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Cortana is really bad

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Re: Cortana is really bad

#81

Post by fhrow4484 »

stinky613 wrote: post #23
sebringj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, isn't that because they are integrated? If you are buying from the google store that has all the info, makes sense. Were you buying from a microsoft store as well? Just wondering because I agree if that is the case, otherwise, there is no integration there. But cool that google has it. I was under the impression is was just some random feature to track a package, my bad if so.

No. If I buy a package from Amazon and the tracking information goes to my gmail account, Google Now cards will automatically show my tracking numbers with links to view full tracking information.

And you wouldn't expect Windows to sneakily read your Gmail account emails.

What if you buy a package from Amazon and the tracking info goes to your outlook.com email? That'd be a fair comparison here. (maybe simply forwarding the email from Gmail to the outlook.com email associated with your Windows account would be sufficient?)

Re: Cortana is really bad

#82

Post by seanp2k2 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #57
louky wrote: post #52

Earlier 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.

https://www.voidtools.com

You might also like http://www.getwox.com (basically Alfred for Windows) which can also search the Everything DB.

There’s also stuff like https://mobile.jam-software.de/ultrasearch/?language=EN and https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/

Yeah, Cortana is awful and if you totally remove it, you break the start menu (just like removing IE back in the day...sigh). Blackbird can stop the Cortana stuff from loading, though: http://www.getblackbird.net/documentation/

I highly recommend Blackbird for stopping Cortana and the other stuff it does (telemetry / tracking blocking + stopping W10 mandatory updates). I basically run this + https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 on new W10 installs at minimum. https://chocolatey.org is also a big improvement for Windows if you don’t already know about it.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#83

Post by Yhippa »

cellis wrote: post #76

Seriously. 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.

My pain point is that I don't know if my command was accepted or not. Also I think that mapping of voice commands to what you can do on the Xbox got reduced and is more confusing. Even on the Xbox One X the latency is still bad.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#84

Post by seanp2k2 »

GolDDranks wrote: post #41
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…

Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory. After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.

Use `mdfind foo` in the terminal on mac. I hate Spotlight and use Alfred instead.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#85

Post by thisisdallas »

nerflad wrote: post #3

> The Product Manager in charge of this feature should be immediately fired. I hate this kind of writing. It undermines the otherwise good point the author has.

I agree. I could just as easily write up an emotional medium post talking about how Cortana is amazing because I can simply add calendar events using my voice. I could then say, "The pm in charge should be the CEO!!!1!!111".

Re: Cortana is really bad

#86

Post by fhrow4484 »

notatoad wrote: post #11
sebringj wrote: post #2

This reminds me of those new gadget commercials that show existing issues being super difficult when they really are not. You were probably in a terrible mood when you wrote this which makes it much worse than it is. It could try to parse the tracking id for sure and you probably have never dealt with tracking packages before through an API but they give you not that much info most of the time, just like "arrived at…

>but the package id won't get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary. Google can figure it out. I order something, i get cards in Google Now telling me exactly what i ordered and its shipping status, without any interaction on my part. It just happens. If microsoft can't figure out how to do this, fine. But if they're going to pop up notifications saying "hey, i can track pack…

But you get the order's confirmation/shipping email on your Gmail account, do you?

Now what tells you this doesn't work with emails received in your outlook.com mailbox?

Or do you expect Windows to read all your Gmail's email somehow?

Re: Cortana is really bad

#87

Post by gmueckl »

cjsuk wrote: post #75
gmueckl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you think that MS is unwilling to pay enough bribes to talented people to keep this product alive? They could certainly afford it.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#88

Post by castis »

emh68 wrote: post #37
castis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then the entire world should rejoice that people like yourself and OP are not in control of other peoples livelihood.

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

Re: Cortana is really bad

#89

Post by eterm »

rspeer wrote: post #34
eterm wrote: post #12

The 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…

I have seen fuzzy search work in a few cases, but they are sparse. Most notably, I never remember what the name of Windows' built-in screenshot application is. It's "Snipping Tool". I often mis-remember it as "Clipping Tool". But anyway, it comes up when I type "screenshot", "clip", or "clipping" into the search bar.

Here's the crazy thing:

Type out "clipping tool" and watch.

It matches all the way to "clipping t". Then it stops matching, then matches again at "clipping tool".

So even if you know a phrase which it matches on, you might or might not get a patch from an exact partial of that matching phrase.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#90

Post by sha666sum »

CydeWeys wrote: post #49
GolDDranks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory. After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.

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".

I think dmenu is a good example of this. It's a common launcher application that's (at least) known to all i3 users. Here's a succinct explanation from the man page:

"dmenu is a dynamic menu for X, which reads a list of newline-separated items from stdin. When the user selects an item and presses Return, their choice is printed to stdout and dmenu terminates. Entering text will narrow the items to those matching the tokens in the input.

dmenu_run is a script used by dwm(1) which lists programs in the user's $PATH and runs the result in their $SHELL."

In practice you press Super + D, type a few letters to match the name of your program (such as "fox" for "firefox"), and press enter. It's so fast that any delay is near imperceptible even on older hardware. It also accepts command line arguments if you don't care to read the stdout from the process. This is a stupidly simple program that works with no configuration unless you want to change the font size.

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