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Cortana is really bad

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Re: Cortana is really bad

#161

Post by emh68 »

castis wrote: post #88
emh68 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the people who have lost their jobs after a company goes under due to horrible product teams? If someone isn’t pulling their weight, you have to boot them for the greater good.

Those people and that scenario have nothing to do with what I'm talking about. An unrelated end user of a product should have no power over a persons work status just because they don't like the product. > the greater good subjectivity at its finest

Oh I see, yeah I agree. “Person responsible for X should be fired” is something I see all the time, but it never occurred to me that it might be a serious request.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#162

Post by MagerValp »

GolDDranks wrote: post #62
dpkonofa wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a series of coincidences more than anything. Spotlight has to index your drive at intervals so, if you recently added an app, it's possible that the app hadn't been indexed yet by Spotlight. Then, by the time you had done the upgrade to paid, Spotlight had indexed the file and and then it started working. There's nothing nefarious going on there. It just sounds like a coincidence.

I don't know what the priors are, but Spotlight having missed the app for a 30 full days, and then suddenly finding it after the full registration, sounds very unlikely to me. However, I do believe it's just an unfortunate bug, nothing more sinister there. Still would be nice to know: why?

A bug kept it from indexing the app when you first installed it. Forcing a re-index of /Applications would have fixed it, likewise duplicating the app and deleting the original.

When you registered the app I assume it modified itself, triggering a re-index.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#163

Post by chasedehan »

kelnos wrote: post #152
coldtea wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who perform poorly at their jobs should either be transferred to another position or terminated. Why is this a controversial position? First, because some random idiot on a blog post does not know whether the person "performed poorly at their job" in general. He just has a specific gripe. The other person might have done miracles in other parts of Cortana. There are such things as shipping priorities, and th…

> some random idiot on a blog post So you're not ok with holding employees responsible for their work product failures, but you're ok with calling people with strong opinions about said failures "random idiots"? Hooray hypocrisy. > That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments. So companies shouldn't take customer feedback into account when making product decisions? That seem like a pret…

>Calling someone an idiot doesn't threaten their livelihood.

Nor does someone calling for a firing on a blog actually threaten a livelihood.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#164

Post by _lce0 »

nerflad wrote: post #129
fpgaminer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comfo…

That same thing (Calc/Calculator) happens to me every day. haha. I never thought about how that is probably affecting a ton of users.

oh my, I'm not alone! ;)

Anybody knows how to get that "calc" thing working as expected?

Re: Cortana is really bad

#165

Post by ladzoppelin »

louky wrote: post #52
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

I just keep a window open running "everything search". Insanely fast and actually works!. Cortana is worse than useless for my use cases. The inability to find installed programs by name is laughably unacceptable. How they continue to push this stuff out is amazing, their management must be really awful.

Everything search is amazing especially for music and pdf searching. Highly recommended and seems to be updated more frequently these days.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#166

Post by MagerValp »

aerique wrote: post #64
dpkonofa wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a series of coincidences more than anything. Spotlight has to index your drive at intervals so, if you recently added an app, it's possible that the app hadn't been indexed yet by Spotlight. Then, by the time you had done the upgrade to paid, Spotlight had indexed the file and and then it started working. There's nothing nefarious going on there. It just sounds like a coincidence.

You'd think that installing a new app would add it to the index right away.

And it does. Copying any app bundle to an indexed disk, like your boot drive, will cause it to get indexed immediately.

There are the occasional bugs though, and there’s also aggressive caching.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#167

Post by flamedoge »

fpgaminer wrote: post #124
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comfo…

giant screw up with typeahead

Re: Cortana is really bad

#168

Post by mathiasrw »

fpgaminer wrote: post #124
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comfo…

Avafind is da thing if you are on Windows.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#169

Post by michielr »

wombatpm wrote: post #154
fpgaminer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comfo…

Shout out for Wox. https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox its what I went to when Launchy stagnated. Its one of the first things I install on new PC's

Check out keypirinha http://keypirinha.com/ if you like Wox. I prefer it over wox a lot.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#170

Post by ethbro »

WorldMaker wrote: post #102
ethbro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to generalize a bit here and say that "smart" features have decreased usability, as aside from single-focus products (e.g. Mint) no one seems to priotize deep discoverabity when the "smart" path fails. Example A: MS trying to funnel all system settings through the search box. If that can't find it because I didn't type in the correct "1996 adventure game"-style keywords, I now have Control Panel (legacy), t…

I disagree with you for a number of reasons, but it starts with I think you have "smart" mixed up as search boxes are the epitome of "dumb", even if a lot of work goes into them behind the scenes to make sure they anticipate what the user wants. Google proved many years ago that average users are more than happy to use a search bar as their primary user interface to everything. I've seen so many users that to go to a…

I used "smart" because ML / AI seemed overly charitable for what was going on behind the scenes. And it's certainly distinct (or tries to be) from "you must type in exactly and only the name of the thing you want to find".

The issue with MS post-ribbon, and I would say this applies to Settings as well, is that I've yet to see them form a good answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the Ribbon?"

Strictly heirarchal menu items were an initial GUI effort I remember, begat ribbon "everything available behind the scenes / set up your own menu bar", begat "let us find it for you".

The issue being there seems little thought in intelligently mediating a discovery action, to wit that I can describe the thing I'm looking for but the system lacks a representation in which I can do so in.

Magical search box discovery affords no such path, because the functioning of the system is deliberately obscured from me. I simply have to try guessing another key phrase associated with the thing I want.

And therein lies my gripe: I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.

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