And yet Cortana is still better than Siri.
But the Google Assistant is a lot smarter than both.
By such leaps that it's hard to compare the two.
Cortana is really bad
71–80 of 303 posts
Re: Cortana is really bad
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What is "everything search"? Is that third party or does it ship with Windows? That sounds like something I need.
Re: Cortana is really bad
#73Re: Cortana is really bad
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've experienced similar. My most pleasant experience with finding and launching applications is, surprisingly, in Linux. I think it's best in breed now. If you'd told me this 15 years ago I wouldn't have believed you, but it's gotten much better over the years and everything else has somehow gotten worse. I spend more time using Linux as a desktop OS than anything else these days, and it "just works".
What DE do you use? Back when I used Unity in Ubuntu I found their search widget really hard to use. It was laggy and mixed in results from the web, their 'appstore', and my files. Now I use dmenu in i3wm and I couldn't be happier. All I need is something that searches my path for applications... and that's what it does.
Not at my computer, so can't provide a detailed answer yet. It's GNOME something-or-other though. Not Unity. And the menu is question that just works is accessible from something like Alt-F2 or the super key (it's muscle memory and I'd need to be at a keyboard to say for sure).
Re: Cortana is really bad
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure about Cortana but I am sure that other project product managers (e.g. Skype) should be fired. They have historic popular issues. Basic negligence, not bugs.
Skype... I am actively trying to get rid of it these days. That ridiculous bloated and slow HTML user interface that many native clients have transitioned to (especially Linux and Android) is beyond description. Why does it need to take up 50% of one core when it is idling in the background? On an i7-6800k no less! On my note 8 it drains the battery in no time while managing to be extremely sluggish and unresponsive.…
I believe the answer is because their talent has left and now there are inexperienced comp science grads, UX designers and marketing left and nothing else.
Re: Cortana is really bad
#76Seriously. I refuse to use Cortana on my Xbox One and went back to the native “Xbox” commands. The latency of cortana was atrocious and usually after all that would either reask the question or not do what Xbox would. Microsoft is really good at taking a good thing (Xbox) and making it more bloated and slower.
Re: Cortana is really bad
#77The whole experience of the start search / cortana / mix is horrible. It can't even fuzzy search. Type "view event" and it brings up "view event logs", if you type "view events" it instead searches bing, in edge, for "view events". Edge isn't even my default browser. Bing isn't my default search engine, and I didn't want to browse the web. Any slight deviation from an exact phrase and it goes straight from "here's th…
Back when I was at MSN everything become oriented at delivering Bing searches at all costs, so whoever did this probably boosted their stats, got a 4.5 on their review, and now nobody dares improving the behaviour lest they have to justify the millions of lost Bing queries per day.
That sounds like a laughable yet true explanation ...
Re: Cortana is really bad
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair point. I use a little hyperbole to emphasize the fact that a product with an incredible global reach should default to well-planned and executed features, particularly if they are sprung upon you with desktop alerts. Hate it or not, someone did a very, very bad job here. Most likely many someones.
I agree with you that it should be implemented better, though I've honestly come to expect this from Windows. It's just a bit extreme considering you submitted it to HN, where the people directly involved actually have a chance of seeing it.
I can see why he did it. These aren't beginners. They're experienced developers and managers. If you work at one of the top 5 tech companies in the world on a product most of the computing world uses then maybe this shouldn't be acceptable.
Why is it that this is acceptable for Microsoft to publish? It's not and what makes it worse is that it often gets abandoned. If they had a history going back and finishing this or making it better I'd give them a pass, but I doubt without something bordering vitriolic appearing on HN/Medium no one will care.
I think that's the real complaint. Doesn't anyone care about the experience anymore? I feel like it's only Apple who both cares and has executed a strong long term plan for this. I opened my iPhone X and that thing worked. I actually love all the little things they added. It is hard to do that, but it's these little things which make the product special or down-right frustrating when they don't.
Re: Cortana is really bad
#79Interesting that elongated micro-whines have now turned into long-form blog posts.
To be honest all of these smart digital assistants have failed me as of late. I used to be able to just text-to-speech searches straight to Google and it did what I wanted to for the most part. Now when I try just any type of reasonable query (I think so at least) Alexa or Google Assistant usually comes back with "Sorry I don't know how to do that" which is frustrating.
Reminds me of the VR hype. Maybe I should just wait for 10 years and this stuff will finally be usable.
Re: Cortana is really bad
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also shows the package tracking information on the Home tab as a card. The flow that the Notebook tab tells Cortana what to pay attention to and the Home tab shows information about the things Cortana is paying attention is a subtle one, but I suppose one UX designers would assume people pick up that Notebook acts like a giant Settings area and Home is the focus area. Also, there is a happy path where Cortana does…
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…
It's basically the command-line probelms all over again, but with english instead of commands.
It's only marginally better. So far nothing has been better than AutoCAD's approach, for me - all GUI commands are echo'd into the command-line as you do them, so you can see what commands you're using if you want to key them in later. Negligible hotkeys because the commands work so well and are more memorable than hotkeys.