Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Upcoming changes to Cortana

support.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 74 posts

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#21

Post by boring_twenties »

pjmlp wrote: post #12
mrweasel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think very few use the voice feature, but those who do will hate losing it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that only a few percent of iPhone users uses Siri. The hype surrounding digital voice assistants have died out. It’s still useful in a few situations, but not having one isn’t as huge a defeat as it would have been 5 years ago. Microsoft could drop Cortana completely and be fine.

I never bother with such devices, because they hardly ever support European Portuguese properly and I am not going to speak foreign languages at home just to make a device happy.

I mean, it's not to make the device happy. It's to make the device do what you want, without you having to get up.

Respect though.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#22

Post by mrweasel »

pjmlp wrote: post #12
mrweasel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think very few use the voice feature, but those who do will hate losing it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that only a few percent of iPhone users uses Siri. The hype surrounding digital voice assistants have died out. It’s still useful in a few situations, but not having one isn’t as huge a defeat as it would have been 5 years ago. Microsoft could drop Cortana completely and be fine.

I never bother with such devices, because they hardly ever support European Portuguese properly and I am not going to speak foreign languages at home just to make a device happy.

European Portuguese? Does that mean they support Brazilian Portuguese better that actual Portuguese?

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#23

Post by superasn »

moooo99 wrote: post #18

While they're at it, why don't they include Windows 10 on that list? I haven't met a single person that uses Cortana and those who tried are usually not coming back. For me Cortana has basically no useful features (maybe its because of my language settings), its just software bloat and in addition to that, its a privacy nightmare. The only association I have with Cortana is it screaming at me when I do a clean instal…

Worst part is it keeps running in the background hogging memory and cpu even when completely disabled. I've tried gpedit, shutup10 and so many other tools to get rid of it but somehow it comes back every time :/

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#24

Post by probably_wrong »

pjmlp wrote: post #12
mrweasel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think very few use the voice feature, but those who do will hate losing it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that only a few percent of iPhone users uses Siri. The hype surrounding digital voice assistants have died out. It’s still useful in a few situations, but not having one isn’t as huge a defeat as it would have been 5 years ago. Microsoft could drop Cortana completely and be fine.

I never bother with such devices, because they hardly ever support European Portuguese properly and I am not going to speak foreign languages at home just to make a device happy.

When I still had a Windows Phone, I couldn't use Cortana because my phone was set in an unsupported language and it wouldn't let me use Cortana in English - if I wanted to use it, I had to switch the entire interface to English.

I would have spoken to it in a foreign language if they had let me. Instead, I have no idea to this day what Cortana sounds like.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#25

Post by unixhero »

pjmlp wrote: post #12
mrweasel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think very few use the voice feature, but those who do will hate losing it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that only a few percent of iPhone users uses Siri. The hype surrounding digital voice assistants have died out. It’s still useful in a few situations, but not having one isn’t as huge a defeat as it would have been 5 years ago. Microsoft could drop Cortana completely and be fine.

I never bother with such devices, because they hardly ever support European Portuguese properly and I am not going to speak foreign languages at home just to make a device happy.

Try having a foreign wife!

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#26

Post by SirHound »

mrweasel wrote: post #5
culturestate wrote: post #3

To clarify, they aren't shutting down Cortana completely - they're ending support for the standalone Cortana apps, which makes sense. What I find more interesting is how they're handling their smart speaker partnership: > ...we’ve worked closely with Harman Kardon to create a Bluetooth-enabled device transition plan that we hope will help ease the impact of this change. Customers who receive a firmware update from Ha…

I think very few use the voice feature, but those who do will hate losing it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that only a few percent of iPhone users uses Siri. The hype surrounding digital voice assistants have died out. It’s still useful in a few situations, but not having one isn’t as huge a defeat as it would have been 5 years ago. Microsoft could drop Cortana completely and be fine.

It'd be useful in more if they were noticeably better today than when they were introduced. I wonder how much is down to intrinsic shortcomings with voice assistance and how much is just no one's made a good one.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#27

Post by pjmlp »

mrweasel wrote: post #22
pjmlp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never bother with such devices, because they hardly ever support European Portuguese properly and I am not going to speak foreign languages at home just to make a device happy.

European Portuguese? Does that mean they support Brazilian Portuguese better that actual Portuguese?

Probably, if they support Portuguese at all.

That is a pet peeve that we have back home, because of market size, many US companies rather support Brazilian Portuguese than any of other variants.

European Portuguese gets left out due to market size, while African and Asian Portuguese get left out due to buying capabilites.

Thing is, having to speak to a device, in another language variant just feels weird, leaving out the little detail that one does need to learn the differences as well.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#29

Post by pjmlp »

boring_twenties wrote: post #21
pjmlp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never bother with such devices, because they hardly ever support European Portuguese properly and I am not going to speak foreign languages at home just to make a device happy.

I mean, it's not to make the device happy. It's to make the device do what you want, without you having to get up. Respect though.

That only re-inforces the cycle of not providing Portuguese support.

Instead of paying for half working stuff and then complaying like many do here, I rather not give any money at all.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#30

Post by doctor_eval »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #16
29athrowaway wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People made fun of the Zune but if you look at it objectively it was actually a good product for its time. The timing and the marketing was perhaps not as good as the product itself.

I agree though. Maybe except the first or maybe second release, these were kinda rushed and really just reskinned Toshiba devices. Microsoft is surprisingly good at designing hardware and devices, and surprisingly bad at marketing them. Just like with Windows Phone, they were late to the party but acted like they already own the market. (I guess you just can't help yourself if you dominate the desktop OS market that…

Oldie but a goodie

https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k

Post reply on HN