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Upcoming changes to Cortana

support.microsoft.com

61–70 of 74 posts

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#61
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…

A favorite pastime of mine was lining up all the new hire computers that had to be setup and seeing if I could mute it before the entire office turned around and told me to shut Cortana up.

HI THERE I’M CORTANA AND I’M HERE TO HELP

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#62
The general problem with all "AI-powered assistants" is that they're not AI-powered assistants. They are voice interfaces atop tiny libraries of utilities.

If I had an AI powered assistant, it's actual data would be on my system, and not out on the internet somewhere. It wouldn't need to send my speech out.

But further, it would actually be an assistant. It would be able to operate all the applications on my computer.

"Cortana, copy the last three Slack messages in the current channel to a new Box document. Call it Requirements and add the date." -> Uses two separate apps for which I have open sessions, can exercise my credentials (where I complete the MFA when needed).

"Cortana, search all my communications for things related to Bob. I need to trace all of his activities that I have record for. Include Sumologic logs for the applications I support." -> Searches chat logs, email, and web application logs out in my log collection.

"Cortana, find out from Mom what groceries she needs today, and place Instacart orders accordingly."

The "assistants" we have today can't combine actions. They are just isolated pools of menu selections. They can't replace hands-on-keyboard for the things I regularly need to do with my computers or devices. They need to become intention-processors, not just language parsers to activate a menu.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#63

The general problem with all "AI-powered assistants" is that they're not AI-powered assistants. They are voice interfaces atop tiny libraries of utilities. If I had an AI powered assistant, it's actual data would be on my system, and not out on the internet somewhere. It wouldn't need to send my speech out. But further, it would actually be an assistant. It would be able to operate all the applications on my computer…

And not even good ones at that. They never take negative re-enforcement, you can't tell them what they just did was wrong or report a problem. You can't say "Good Bot" and let it know that the response it gave was what you expected and to continue to return results similar. Hell, if it was just 'stupid' you could keep programming new features into it and new ways to get to the same features with slightly different wording. But no. We don't even get that. Just this awful black box that "sometimes does what it's asked" and can barely reference previous incantations. Uhg.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#64
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> actual Portuguese would you consider British English the only actual English? Not only Brazil has 20 times the population of Portugal, but there are considerations to be made about how languages evolve in the periphery, which might not apply to Portuguese, but certainly apply to Canadian French vs French French.

No and many English variants suffer the same problems of US English first.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#65
post #48
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…

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.

The big hurdle for voice UI is discoverability.

That's probably why it's most successful in a handful of verticals, like timers and music control. There are a finite list of likely commands, and people can probably guess them first time.

When you move much beyond that, you start getting a high miss rate because there's no good way to pull a list of valid commands or options.

Importantly, especially for home automation, "option guessability" is a big thing-- you might know the commands, but the relevant options are specific to each location, and you were likely not there when it was configured. How do you know that the light fixtures are named "Left sconce, right sconce, ceiling fan, and table lamp", and not "north, south, Bob, and Matilda?"

Voice UI is also a terrible situation for error recovery. I can't figure out a voice-only UI that would handle a simple case like "which light do you want to turn on?" well. At best, it could read you a list of all the devices that might be relevant for the question, but that's so low information-density and will feel like a bad telephone IVR service.

The "Siri with a screen" design convention might have been sensible, as that would have provided a way to disambiguate queries quickly, with buttons to show the options, and at idle, a browsable list of supported commands.

Of course, at that point, you're making a more obvious machine with a (voice-based) command-line. That's shatters the illusion they're selling of this being your secretary/concierge, with arbitrary and broad capabilities, who happens to be a robot.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#66
post #36

Earlier 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".

Oh thanks I didn't know that. I thought it was the annoying assistant.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#67
post #43
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…

My favorite: > As we make this shift toward a transformational AI-powered assistant experience in Microsoft 365... While I’m sure there’s a world of difference, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought of Clippy making a comeback. “transformational AI-powered assistant experience in Microsoft 365” certainly sounds like a PR-enhanced description of Clippy.

Hah, it sounds more like Clippy wrote this PR puff piece!

I can just imagine PR Clippy...

"It looks like you're trying to write spin, can I help you with that?"

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#68
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'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.

Scot here, I have this problem with telephone voice menus. Actually, I've also had this problem in the US as well, particularly while on the telephone. Putting on a fake US accent seems to work, but it's so damn embarrassing and I guess could be construed as offensive by some people (if they thought I was taking the piss).

I had the same issue recently with a BMW voice activation system I was playing with. Mimicking an English accent worked for that one!

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#69
post #36

Earlier 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".

Oh thanks I didn't know that. I thought it was the annoying assistant.

If your windows is up to date, there is no cortana anymore.

(Well, it gone on my PC and I did nothing in particular). It was the annoying assistant, and the start menu.

Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana

#70
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.

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.

IMO it's intrinsic shortcomings. These started coming out once the language processing got good enough to be reliable. And that part has continued advancing. But after you have that parsed instruction, what do you do with it? That's the part that's basically "AI hard" and is the real limiting factor. The "skills" approach routes around the problem by having exact keywords passed off to particular specialized handlers. But that means it can only ever do what it's been explicitly taught to do, and with explicit keywords.
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