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Upcoming changes to Cortana

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Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#31

Post by m0zg »

Other than for setting timers and turning the lights on and off, all of this "voice assisted" stuff doesn't really work. So providers should either make it work or abandon it if they can't (and yes, they can't), leaving only the scenarios that do work operational. Kudos to Microsoft - they're admitting what was obvious to everyone for quite a while.

This is especially egregious with Siri, which Apple repeatedly tries to gaslight everyone about. Apple does demos every year, yet Siri continues to suck just as it always did. But Apple keeps pretending that it doesn't suck. This goes completely against the ethos of Apple not releasing stuff until it's "insanely great".

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#32

Post by frereubu »

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'm a British English speaker, and about 15 years ago I spent an afternoon experimenting with the basic voice recognition on OSX. I found that I had to mimic a US or Australian accent to get it to work, and I wondered what my next-door neighbours were thinking when they heard me cycle repeatedly through "Give me the phone number for Firstname Lastname" with British, US and Australian accents.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#33

Post by Closi »

m0zg wrote: post #31

Other than for setting timers and turning the lights on and off, all of this "voice assisted" stuff doesn't really work. So providers should either make it work or abandon it if they can't (and yes, they can't), leaving only the scenarios that do work operational. Kudos to Microsoft - they're admitting what was obvious to everyone for quite a while. This is especially egregious with Siri, which Apple repeatedly tries…

The other use case is text message dictation while driving - which is excellent.

These types of system can’t be released “only when perfect” unfortunately as they need many iterations with real world data.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#34

Post by myopenid4 »

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…

Their hardware sucks, just like their software. This is from a person who went from Nokia Symbian, to Microsoft's Nokia and finally the dead Windows Phone.

They somehow managed to take Nokia with their amazing hardware (look at Nokia N9, N900 and Maemo) and turn it into pure garbage (Microsoft Lumia series and their POS Windows Phone 10).

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#35

Post by Sharlin »

dan1234 wrote: post #7
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.

The only thing I regularly use Siri for is timers, where it’s genuinely quicker to say “15 minute timer” than it is to open the app.

Agreed, although I’ve found force touch on the Control Center icon a nice shortcut as well.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#36

Post by Kuinox »

superasn wrote: post #23
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 :/

The start menu, that need to index your files in background, or do other stuff, is named "cortana".

I don't think you want to disable this "cortana".

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#37

Post by iforgotpassword »

myopenid4 wrote: post #34
iforgotpassword wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Their hardware sucks, just like their software. This is from a person who went from Nokia Symbian, to Microsoft's Nokia and finally the dead Windows Phone. They somehow managed to take Nokia with their amazing hardware (look at Nokia N9, N900 and Maemo) and turn it into pure garbage (Microsoft Lumia series and their POS Windows Phone 10).

Completely different experience for me. Symbian was a confusing mess, so much that I stayed with a feature phone for another while. WP8 felt responsive, the UI consistent and surprisingly clean. Scrolling was smooth in 2013 when on Android it had frequent stuttering except maybe the flagship devices. The problem was that it was missing all the important apps and then some. They made sure to set the bar high for starting to develop apps for it and then wondered why nobody started porting to WP.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#38

Post by Igelau »

evilos wrote: post #8
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.

Anytime I see someone mention the Zune it is always followed by what you just said. And then someone does what I am doing now.

We are all connected in the great Circle of Zune.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#39

Post by addicted »

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…

The Zune was flashy and sexy looking, but the text on the screen was so large that it conveyed a fraction of the information an iPod screen did in a much smaller size. All the backgrounds and all were also distracting.

It was also huge compared to contemporary iPods. From what I remember, one of the few nice features were the sharing capabilities, where you could Zune songs you had bought over to friends, but those only worked Zune to Zune, so to actually avail that feature it had to first become popular enough that you would frequently meet people who also owned a Zune.

The Zune wasn’t a bad device. It was just too little too late. And the iPhone introduced less than a year later (and the obvious iPod touch that everyone knew was coming) meant that it was all over for the Zune before it even had a chance to get started.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#40

Post by Igelau »

aasasd wrote: post #14

Love current PR lingo. Just shove self-praise into every piece of communication. > Cortana is continuing to redefine the nature of a digital assistant, ... accelerating productivity to help save you time and focus on the things that matter most > The first change is to end support for all third-party Cortana skills > Cortana in Surface Headphones will continue pivoting toward its mission to help customers with produc…

We would like to reiterate that we have not sent Cortana to the glue factory!
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