Good riddance!!
Upcoming changes to Cortana
11–20 of 74 posts
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#12To 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.
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.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#13Earlier 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'd like to use the assistant on Android exactly for this, and probably a few other automation tasks. I love me some fiddling with semi-automated workflows. If only I wasn't averse to putting my voiceprint on Google's servers.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#14Love 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 productivity throughout their day. We’ll be removing support for the previous version of Cortana in the first version of Surface Headphones
So much acceleration, wow.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#15Earlier 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.
and what's the reply to comment like yours?
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#16Will it still work on my Zune?
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 much.) Both times they added unnecessary restrictions to the devices and set the pricing relatively high. You can do this if you're Apple and created the whole market and are generally known as a premium brand, but MS just isn't.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#17To 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…
> f I'm reading this correctly, they're basically saying "very few people really use this as a 'smart' speaker, so we'll just turn it into a normal Bluetooth speaker and move on." I'm not sure whether that says more about Cortana or about the smart speaker market, but it seems like an...ok compromise? Certainly better than just bricking the thing.
I tend to agree: I think switching it to a simple Bluetooth speaker is a reasonable way forward under the circumstances.
As a related aside this, along with a raft of other support withdrawals recently (the most recent that comes to mind is those smart glasses), I do feel somewhat vindicated in my policy to keep things as dumb as possible: speakers are just speakers, lightbulbs are just lightbulbs, my kettle is just a kettle, and - if I do need any smarts - I attach a general purpose computing device to provide them. E.g, it's just incredibly easy to connect my laptop or phone to my hi-fi via a DAC or audio interface to stream music over Spotify.
The point of this is that it means most of my household devices and appliances remain brick-proof, and I shouldn't have to keep replacing them every 3 - 5 years just because manufacturers stop supporting them.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#18While 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 install of Windows 10, which is a thing of the past thanks to my switch to macOS.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#19To 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…
> f I'm reading this correctly, they're basically saying "very few people really use this as a 'smart' speaker, so we'll just turn it into a normal Bluetooth speaker and move on." I'm not sure whether that says more about Cortana or about the smart speaker market, but it seems like an...ok compromise? Certainly better than just bricking the thing. I tend to agree: I think switching it to a simple Bluetooth speaker is…
> I do feel somewhat vindicated in my policy to keep things as dumb as possible
I have a similar but marginally more lax policy: I'm fine with smart devices as long as they don't have to phone home to operate and they have on-device controls.
For obviously Internet of Shit-worthy appliances (Cory Doctorow's smart toaster or whatever) I'll always choose the dumb version, and I make sure that I only use home automation stuff that's as widely interoperable as possible, but otherwise I don't particularly fuss about it as long as it meets all of my other requirements.
I think modularity is really key here. As long as you can replace or update each component individually without impacting the rest of it, you should be good.
Re: Upcoming changes to Cortana
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
> f I'm reading this correctly, they're basically saying "very few people really use this as a 'smart' speaker, so we'll just turn it into a normal Bluetooth speaker and move on." I'm not sure whether that says more about Cortana or about the smart speaker market, but it seems like an...ok compromise? Certainly better than just bricking the thing. I tend to agree: I think switching it to a simple Bluetooth speaker is…
> I do feel somewhat vindicated in my policy to keep things as dumb as possible I have a similar but marginally more lax policy: I'm fine with smart devices as long as they don't have to phone home to operate and they have on-device controls. For obviously Internet of Shit-worthy appliances (Cory Doctorow's smart toaster or whatever) I'll always choose the dumb version, and I make sure that I only use home automation…
> I think modularity is really key here. As long as you can replace or update each component individually without impacting the rest of it, you should be good.
That's exactly it: the ability to easily swap out components, and then high levels of interoperability. I think I perhaps didn't express myself so well because I'm broadly in agreement with you. It's the phone home aspect that often makes smart devices a problem.