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Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

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Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not see the big 'A' at the start? 'At its Build 2014 conference' makes sense.

Nevertheless it's hard not to notice that the first word appears to be "tits". Is there a typesetting term for that, like keming?

"kerning"... but (meta) if you read it in an improperly kerned font it probably looking like "keming"

Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#72
post #62

I am slowly becoming convinced that the next killer app is the personal assistant app. My life is sharded between contact books and voip apps and IM and email that hardly if ever talk to each other or make my life easier. Its a huge market, but space for a lot of niches.

What we need is to simplify our lives, not to make so complicated to the extent that we feel lost without personal assistant on our wrists, pockets and in front of our eyes. This whole trend is in reverse direction. We are slapping more complexity on top of more complexity. This is only going to make people's live more complex, requiring even more smarter personal assistants. It's a vicious cycle.

Let me compare how simple my life is compared to the life of my ancestors:

I have a toothache - I simply go to the dentist.

I need food - I simply go to a shop

I need water - i simply turn on a tap.

The "complexity" of my modern, urban life is the cost of having my life already very very simple.

Yes the noise of my daily life feels more complex, but there is a great deal of signal if I chose my perspective correctly.

Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#73
I am not a WP user, but this makes me want to give it a shot. Microsoft Research has some of the best researchers and some really impressive projects. I'd really love to see more of that research being put to use like Google does. I guess it is starting to happen now.

Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#74
post #4

Named after the fictional Halo character: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana

I think it's a fascinating move on Microsoft's part to integrate a video game character into a users day-to-day reality. I can imagine some nostalgia fueled sales happening as a result. But moreover, I can't help but be reminded of the movie Her. Where the lines between our physical reality and our digital reality start to blur

To me it's a particularly intriguing move because Cortana's story wasn't a happy one. I know that most of the people aware of that fact also won't be fazed by it (if you've played that much Halo, you can probably distinguish the assistant from the character), but it's a surprisingly deep choice to take a name from a character who faced AI decay and all kinds of other scary techno-ills.

Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#75
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually they offer an app that lets you install updates directly from Microsoft , months before Nokia releases the update. Once Nokia releases its version of the update, it automatically uninstalls the "beta" MS updates. It allowed me to run Windows phone Black update like 4 months before Nokia released them. The app is called "Preview for Developers" and it makes you sign into your live account. http://www.windowsp…

Don't you need a dev account or unlocked dev phone in order to use this?

I think you just have to sign into your live account. Its completely free and took 5 minutes to get install/initiated. After you install , just check updates like you normally would and the new ones should appear. April 8 is when the new 8.1 will appear for anyone with this app installed and registered.

Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#76
post #3

Kudos to MS for making their personal assistant extendable by third party apps. Neither Apple nor Google have managed to do that yet.

I've been waiting for this, being able to ask siri(Cortana) to set my nest or lock unlock the Lockitron would be awesome. Even better would be an IFTTT app that could run certain scripts based on certain phrases. Like "Good Night Cortana" would adjust my thermostat, lock the doors, and turn off any lights that are still on and make sure my alarm is set.

This is a feature that would make me interested in switching to a WinPhone

Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#77
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there are only 8 different phones that run iOS, and they are all made by the same company. While there are hundreds of phones that run android made by tens of different companies, it's not that easy to do the same with android.

So this is one thing that puzzles me. Why can't phones have modular drivers like a PC? Phones of today are way more powerful than PC of the past, but it seems that manufacturers still want to keep an appliance like structure for the phone. In my ideal world, I'd download (say) Android 4.4 and install it on my phone. After that, I'd hunt around, download and install the drivers for my phone like mic, camera, gyro, etc…

Sounds like a crummy world to me if you have to hunt around for drivers. I'd rather everything just worked out of the box, with the option to change drivers around later if I want. Getting drivers working is one of the worst parts of an OS install.

Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#78

I am slowly becoming convinced that the next killer app is the personal assistant app. My life is sharded between contact books and voip apps and IM and email that hardly if ever talk to each other or make my life easier. Its a huge market, but space for a lot of niches.

You get a lot more integration than you probably think with Google Now. It reads my e-mail to keep track of my upcoming flights and packages being delivered. It checks out my calendar and will conveniently provide directions to events on my schedule. There's not a great level of integration for the google chat and voice features yet, but it's coming I'm sure.

But notice that that's only integration between Google services. A 3rd-party API is a whole different game.

Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#79
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there are only 8 different phones that run iOS, and they are all made by the same company. While there are hundreds of phones that run android made by tens of different companies, it's not that easy to do the same with android.

So this is one thing that puzzles me. Why can't phones have modular drivers like a PC? Phones of today are way more powerful than PC of the past, but it seems that manufacturers still want to keep an appliance like structure for the phone. In my ideal world, I'd download (say) Android 4.4 and install it on my phone. After that, I'd hunt around, download and install the drivers for my phone like mic, camera, gyro, etc…

Historically a huge amount of effort went into making PC hardware enumerable at runtime and hotpluggable: BIOS, then ISA PnP, then PCI/PCIe, and ACPI. eg. There are BIOS functions dedicated to telling you, in no uncertain terms, what RAM you have and the addresses it appears at.

ARM's architecture is still quite firmly stuck with the embedded approach where you get your memory map and peripheral availability at compile time, probably by reading addresses from a manual published by your SoC manufacturer. Usually at early boot there is nothing which will tell you where your RAM is, what peripherals you have and where they are, etc. You either just have to know, or have some non-standard configuration mechanism which tells you.

Things are improving, but slowly. ACPI exists for ARM and is being actively worked on, but isn't widely deployed yet.

Re: Microsoft unveils Windows Phone 8.1 with personal assistant Cortana

#80

Days like this make me sad that I can't have the best of Windows Phone, iOS and Android at the same time. A "Cortana for Android" would be great. Some day perhaps phones will be standardized enough that, like the web, we can develop once and run anywhere without major sacrifices.

Can I have the launcher from Palm WebOS too?
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