One of the assistant's could stand out if they allow 3rd party devs to use it and allow an incognito mode. Otherwise it's just a way for them to collect data^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbig brother us.
Upcoming changes to Cortana
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#52Love 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…
> As we make this shift toward a transformational AI-powered assistant experience in Microsoft 365, we need to adjust our focus areas of innovation and development to give our customers assistance where they need it most. As a result, we are making changes to some U.S. consumer-centric features and functionalities with lower usage.
I can’t even parse that last line. “Making changes [to functionality] with lower usage.”
Does that mean that it is less used? Or does that mean they are lowering usage?
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#53Earlier 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.
I use Siri to ask it to use Waze for directions to locations I want to drive to. Works incredibly well.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#54Other 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…
Yes, other than timers, reminders, delivery notifications, home automation, weather, music/podcast playback, Bluetooth speaker, unit conversion, and grocery items (e.g. OurGroceries), voice assistants are useless.
Sure, but what did the voice assistants ever do for us?
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#55To 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…
> they're ending support for the standalone Cortana apps, which makes sense This is actually the hardest part for me to understand. They want me to drag a Win10 laptop everywhere to use the assistant instead of just using my phone?
They're adding it to the Teams and Outlook apps and pushing Cortana toward businesses.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#56While 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…
Cortana is now a standalone app that can be uninstalled and updated separately from Microsoft Store.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Serious question for better programmers than me: Doesn’t it violate seperation of concerns that something like the start menu that has a specific function and has been around for decades get smashed into the Cortana code and renamed. Cortana is clearly not core to the functionality of the start menu and if it became so it surely wasn’t out of necessity right?
It reminds me of when Microsoft was dead set on conflating the file manager “explorer” and Internet Explorer.
Can someone justify this?
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#58Earlier 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…
Windows Phone was hostile to both developer and OEM though. By comparison publishing apps on Play Store on Android only requires one time fee and Android was free and open source to OEM except with Play Store, which can be free if several Google Apps is preloaded.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Serious question for better programmers than me: Doesn’t it violate seperation of concerns that something like the start menu that has a specific function and has been around for decades get smashed into the Cortana code and renamed. Cortana is clearly not core to the functionality of the start menu and if it became so it surely wasn’t out of necessity right? It reminds me of when Microsoft was dead set on conflating…
It's like monolith and micro services.
From the programming standpoint, a monolith can be splitted in components, but compiled/bundled/linked to a single executable. This doesn't violate the seperation of concern. It's bad taste/marketing/whatever.
I checked on my Windows and they did separate Cortana and the Search/Start menu recently.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#60Earlier 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…
Windows Phone was hostile to both developer and OEM though. By comparison publishing apps on Play Store on Android only requires one time fee and Android was free and open source to OEM except with Play Store, which can be free if several Google Apps is preloaded.
That's what I broadly covered by bad marketing and "thinking you already own the market". Apple could pull it off to be dicks to app developers because they were first to market. You simply had no choice. Google understood they need to catch up to IOS at any cost, so made it as easy as possible for anyone to start mucking around with app development. Sideloading required one change in the settings menu and you could shove as many random apks to your device as possible. For WP you needed to sign up for an account to even just launch the IDE. The included emulator didn't work on Windows Home editions, so you elegantly pissed off the curious teen on their budget PC. Sideloading was pretty much only possible in this dev setup with iirc one app at a time. Microsoft was third to the party and seriously came up with this kind of bullshit. And they wonder why they failed.