
Cortana is really bad - johndavidback
https://medium.com/@johndavidback/cortana-is-really-really-bad-6ca96733ef4d
======
CydeWeys
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 tried to search for an
application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found,
then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or
Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the
executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet
Cortana couldn't find it.

I _never_ want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want
a web search I'll do it in Chrome's address bar. When I type "notepad" I want
it to launch Notepad, not query the web!

Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched
in this state?

~~~
fpgaminer
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. Comforting to know everyone is having
similar problems ... though still just as bewildering as to why it's happening
in the first place.

It's weird that there are no great "magic search" tools on any desktop
environment I've used. Windows 7 is close, but doesn't include any fancy
results (can't have it do quick math, etc). Mac's Spotlight gets everything
right, except it won't open a new window if I type, say, "firefox". It'll just
pull up a window I already have open (no way to change that behavior without
weird hacks). Unity's gets confused and breaks too often. Cinnamon's sorts
results alphabetically. Gnome's is fairly close to ideal, though it forgets
launch history too quickly (if I type "calc" and select LibreOffice's Calc
just _once_ it'll start showing that first, instead of Calculator which I want
95% of the time when typing "calc").

~~~
vocatus_gate
There IS a magic search tool, I've been using it for years.

[https://everything.en.softonic.com/](https://everything.en.softonic.com/)

"Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and
can run standalone.

~~~
cabaalis
Despite your glowing review, I cannot bring myself to download and install
_anything_ from sites like these. I'm sure it's a great program.

~~~
vinw
Everything's site is voidtools.com

[https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/](https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/)

------
nerflad
> ___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.

~~~
johndavidback
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.

~~~
nerflad
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.

~~~
0xCMP
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.

~~~
symfoniq
If the current MacBook Pro is any indication, I’m not sure how much Apple
cares about experience, either. I’m still trying to figure out who that
machine is made for: Horrible keyboard, gimmicky Touch Bar, worse battery life
than the previous generation, no ports relevant to existing devices (including
Apple’s own flagship smartphone)... I don’t think Apple can be accused of
sweating the details anymore, either.

~~~
0xCMP
Very true, but Apple is consumer focused, vs Microsoft is enterprise focused,
and so I think we still have a better chance for Apple to react to this than
Microsoft would have.

------
eterm
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
the program you want to run" to popping up it's search engine.

~~~
frandroid
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.

~~~
TheGRS
I bought Windows 10 this year and if this is the sort of behavior I should
expect from a Win OS these days then I'll probably just go to linux or even
back to OSX.

~~~
microcolonel
You should expect much worse! (and be careful investing in the Apple ecosystem
either, because I doubt they have the restraint to avoid doing just as bad on
the desktop)

------
TheGRS
Alright, I'm glad this is brought up. I am back on Windows 10 after being on
OSX for years. For the most part its fine, but it does a lot of things that I
just plain don't understand. I have no idea how to configure the little metro
page to my liking (like, I know how to remove stuff, but how do I make it
useful?). Why does it even exist?

I can see Microsoft put _a lot_ of work into making Win10 user friendly, but
it seems like their designers don't understand their users or something. OSX
has some bizarre interactions as well (like Finder, wtf is happening there),
but for the most part it just works.

I guess I don't really know what I want my operating system to _do_ precisely.
I want it to be smooth, I want it to open programs quickly, I want it to move
files around without hassle, and I want it to be secure while also be easily
extensible. Unfortunately there's a lot of different interpretations of what
those things should be. I can appreciate that making a world class operating
system on top of decades of legacy code is difficult, but I also need to say:
WTF is half of this shit?

Windows doesn't even come with a simple key reassignment. I had to download
SharpKeys to set Caps Lock as Ctrl. That sort of thing just comes with OSX.

~~~
wvenable
Honestly I'm kind of ok with key reassignment apps not coming with the OS. At
this point I'm more annoyed with the software that come pre-installed on
operating systems than what they don't have. I can always download whatever
apps I want.

But I totally agree that designers don't understand their users. I think
there's a sense that Windows has to be "cool" like Android and iOS rather than
just "useful".

~~~
mysterypie
> Honestly I'm kind of ok with key reassignment apps not coming with the OS. I
> can always download whatever apps I want.

I'd agree that the OS shouldn't come pre-installed with major applications.
Those are things that I've invested time and effort to learn and where I have
a definite preference on what I want to download.

But to having to research little things like key reassignment apps becomes a
real chore. Then you have to download and install it, make sure it's not
malware, and if you use multiple machines, repeat those steps.

The older versions of the iPhone and the iPad didn't come with a calculator. I
don't know if current versions now include a calculator, but having to test a
dozen different garbage calculators out of 1000 mind-numbing choices in the
app store was a real pain in the neck. Any simple ad-free calculator included
in iOS would have been OK.

------
neves
How can I disable Cortana?

I've tried and failed. I don't know why it is necessary an auxiliar app just
to index my executables just to be able to type a few letters and start them
quickly.

~~~
milcron
The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.

~~~
mcny
> The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.

Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard
disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I just have a web browser open. Windows, you don't
need to do everything at this very moment.

Why can't Windows Update be as simple as this?
[https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d...](https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d7e-9dc6-821074570be3/49f58bac6fcc3e9f2d671a739c0f1e00/fedora2220052915.png)
[https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png](https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png)

Instead what I get (even with Windows 7) is a spinning wheel that says
"Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes...". Happens every
time I want to use Windows (which is more of a reason to stay in the Linux
partition tbh)

~~~
vanderZwan
> Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the
> hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM.

I have 64 GB of RAM, and even tried turning off the swap. Still see that HDD
light blinking. I don't know what is going on.

~~~
rasz
Its gathering telemetry, running live traces on your software, gathering
statistics, everything gets packaged and uploaded to the mothership regularly

~~~
mcny
> Its gathering telemetry, running live traces on your software, gathering
> statistics, everything gets packaged and uploaded to the mothership
> regularly

but GP has 64 GB(!!) of memory. They don't need to write the information to
disk. They could just ship the data from the memory straight back to the
mothership, no? I mean Office 365 has a heartbeat and nobody complains about
the near constant network chatter. It just makes Microsoft look insidious (is
that the right word?) that they're collecting all this data.

The fact that gaming mode [xbox on youtube] exists makes me think that Windows
is driving with one hand tied behind its back when not in game mode. Why would
they do this?

[xbox on youtube] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc-
ka42BMls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc-ka42BMls)

~~~
rasz
but what if you crash? precious personal data gets lost, have to flush
everything to HDD immediately.

------
wvenable
I really wish Microsoft wouldn't bloat Windows with all these useless
features. They're still acting like they are building a mobile OS. Windows 10
would be fantastic OS if it wasn't for all these misguided attempts to act
like iOS and Android.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
They made a mistake starting with Windows 8, I'm guessing they were worried
about the iPad eating into PC sales. Well it turned out that that didn't
really happen but we are stuck with the tabletisation of Windows anyway.

I've been trying a Surface but it's going back because it isn't good at being
a tablet nor laptop.

------
sebringj
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 shipping location" or "on route
to destination" type messages with some times, totally depends on when the
tracking is sent out. This is just a very specific use case that isn't so user
friendly anyway but sure they could do it better but the package id won't get
you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is
necessary.

~~~
notatoad
>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 packages for you", they should
be at least sort of on par with the competition.

~~~
sebringj
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.

~~~
stinky613
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.

~~~
fhrow4484
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?)

~~~
nsp
He says he’s given Microsoft access to his inbox

------
cbhl
One piece that's missing from this post is -- what did the email containing
the tracking number look like?

GMail, for example, only parses out package numbers if the retailer sends
schema.org markup for it.
([https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel-...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel-
delivery))

------
Theodores
The Google approach is much better. Tracking numbers go out in email to the
customer and you can put little xml snippets in there so that gmail can put
'track order' in the subject with a little button to click. This goes to the
URL provided in the email, not to some magical service that magically
determines if that tracking number came from UPS, USPS, Royal Mail, China
Post, or whatever. Due to how couriers merge and get acquired you don't even
have consistent tracking numbers for a given courier. So it is much better for
the customer to not be guessing this stuff with Cortana.

Not everyone uses gmail. But, in the UK, for ecommerce, you can fully expect
more than 50% of the order emails to be gmail addresses. Therefore the xml
snippets approach is worth doing.

[https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/)

~~~
dingo_bat
This is also present on outlook. I wonder why Cortana can't just use that same
logic. I guess they had to justify their existence by coding up the same thing
again.

~~~
contextfree
Cortana does use the same logic for automatically finding the tracking
information, that has nothing to do with anything in the article though, which
is about the UX for _manually_ entering the tracking information.

------
moonman272
This is just old school Microsoft engineering. Add a feature bullet point to
the package, don’t worry about how it’s integrated or if it works. It’s the
same with most anything from them you dig in to.

------
magice
As much fun as it is to bash Microsoft and Windows (although, let's face it,
Windows has been so much better in the last few releases), I personally think
Microsoft, its engineers, as well as its PM deserve (some?) empathy rather
than anger for this.

I mean, I can almost imagine how this thing happens. Someone somewhere
sometime said, "hey, wouldn't it be cool if xyz?" Someone else replied with
"oh yeah, and it's not THAT hard!" And the PM is probably like "well, low
risk, too, so whatever you wish."

Then, the feature is thrown together, with or without explicit planning. It
probably attracts way higher attention than expected, because either it is
hooked into mechanism intended for real important stuff or it can be demoed so
nicely (imagine: if you are the developer doing demoing, you probably have the
damned tracking number ready for copy and paste). It does not support all
operations, because no one looks at it twice after some brief "yo, so cool"
moment.

The annoyance may or may not have a bug associated with it somewhere. But
let's be realistic. If you are a PM, which one would you choose: "some nobody-
care feature is not easy to use" or "if you stand on 1 leg, jump 3 times,
press the code of Mordor, Windows seg faults itself". The 1st one is vague
and, let's be frank, not that big of a deal. The 2nd one is a big deal: data
loss and all manners of unspeakable conditions may break loose. So, any PM
would do the 2nd bug first.

I mean, seriously, _how_ would you ensure this tiny corner (which a comment
below actually says, "I did not realize it exist") is "easy to use"? No
automation tests can catch it. Demoing (again, the developers know how to use
it and probably come prepared) won't catch it. A/B testing probably won't even
get to it. Its bugs (except if that bugs involving Start menu crashing down)
probably have priority between "when I have better work-life balance" and
"when the machine is capable of fixing its own issues."

\--

I will agree that all of these don't justify for a shitty experience. Shitty
experiences, no matter how small, are shitty. But then, even LaTeX, perfected
as it is, annoys me once in a while. Even Emacs, glorious as it is, has "I
swear I will switch to Eclipse" moments. And Scheme has about 70 different
ways of doing OO programming, none of which really works for my little case.

So, maybe a bit more love/understanding? It probably helps your (i.e. the
users') blood pressure anyway.

~~~
gerrard00
I don't think they deserve empathy at all. If they can't implement the feature
to the level of being usable they should just cut the feature instead of
annoying the user.

So much software development today is about getting story points on a velocity
chart and claiming that features have been delivered even if the feature is
actually useless. A Minimum Viable Product should actually be viable.

~~~
jasonlotito
So, let's fail Spotlight on iOS too, because searching for tdbank never works
for me to bring up the TD Bank app. Seems like such a simple thing, but nope.
Can't forget that bloody space. And that seems like a bigger failure than
anything the article was talking about.

------
camhenlin
I try to use Cortana to control my Xbox One sometimes. Saying "Hey Cortana,
pause" is really handy if you're in the middle of watching Netflix, and you
get a phone call, or some other life event happens. Or it would be, if Cortana
didn't take 15-20 seconds to think about it, and only work about 75% of the
time, despite having an 8 core processor and a huge array of sensors.

------
lousken
Removing cortana was the first thing that I did when I installed windows 10.
However even the basic search is incredibly bad. It took months before it even
considered searching in Downloads folder (patch fixed it I guess?). And
portable apps? Yea, gl with that.

But my main problem with searching is when I search for settings and windows
apps. That's just pure trash. There're no aliases so if you don't know exactly
how MS named the functionality you're fucked. And if you know the english word
for it, it doesn't show up either. And the worst thing: if you KNEW how it
used to be called but not the current translation you're also fucked. E.g. in
english you search for screen saver. In czech it used to be "Spořič obrazovky"
but now it's "Šetřič obrazovky". (btw neither of these even show up in the
creators update, but in falls they fixed it and "Šetřič obrazovky" will return
correct result).

Another thing that bothers me with search is diacritics, you have to use it if
you want to find anything that has it. And gl with that when using english
keyboard layout.

It's increadibly frustrating to use and I've mostly given up on it and use
powershell whenever I can. That doesn't fix my problems with diacritics when
searching documents though.

------
rdtsc
Doing anything that approaches human interaction levels is hard. As soon as
you make something that responds to language, or looks like a humanoid robot
people will automatically expect it to work at the perceived level (i.e. like
a human).

That means users will get frustrated quickly if it misunderstands or or makes
other mistakes. It completely breaks the interaction. To add on top of it, it
makes the human feel stupid having to enunciate or repeat the same thing over
and over. If they'd would be typing into a search box for search application,
they'd be fine with it not working because it's just a stupid program. As soon
as the program is an "AI" or an "assistance" it better be darn good, or it
will make users very angry and frustrated.

There is also some little part of the human brain that says "oh you think you
can act like a human, let's how you respond to this", so they will
deliberately mess with it or provide it with confusing input just to see what
would happen. (I saw customers do it, they were already frustrated because of
a different reason, but used the speech interaction API to really demonstrate
how broken the product is). Can't blame them, it was broken, but it was a
useful less on to learn.

------
trynumber9
I've been very disappointed with Cortana. On numerous occasions it has been
faster to grab my Macbook out of my backpack. Why is Spotlight able to find a
file on my Windows desktop's network share that Cortana would not find?

And to top it off Spotlight shows me accurate previews of Excel and Word
documents. But Cortana, another Microsoft product, does not. Perhaps that's a
compliment to the team that makes Office for Mac.

~~~
lostgame
Actually, AFAIK, Apple uses the Pages rendering system for that? I know Quick
Look and Preview are also able to view, but not edit, .doc and .docx files.

------
api
It's got nothing on "Bixby," Samsung's me-too entrant into the world of
largely useless voice assistants.

------
hnnsj
"People get worked up as hell and I frankly just want to have fun with my
devices."

How is this entire post anything but "getting worked up as hell"? Seems to me
to be a case of "when other people complain, they're whiny, but when _I_ get
annoyed, heads must roll!".

------
cjsuk
This is most user journeys with MSFT products recently.

------
Havoc
That entire menu makes me serious question whether anyone at MS actually uses
Win 10.

No MS I don't feeling spending half an hour figuring out what the hell is
going on in that UX. That pretty much says it all about how intuitive it is
dear designer...

------
Yhippa
Interesting 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.

------
icc97
The speech recognition of Cortana was pretty excellent - which is what the
guys at Microsoft Research care about. The rest just seems to have got messed
up in politics.

------
ChuckMcM
I have really enjoyed the comments here. I have observed that among my
acquaintances Cortana can be either _really_ helpful or _really_ not helpful
but I don't see a lot of in between sort of "good for this, but not this"
sorts of reviews.

From the perspective of a dialog system I see it as a bunch of assumptions
that are made prior to engaging in the dialog. And given that hypothesis I
have looked at people interactions to see how people deal with this sort of
'communication mismatch' and how they detect it.

Certainly there are repeated asks of the same question slightly rephrased as
an indicator of a mismatch, but there is also a general resistance to
interacting. So with people if someone gets frustrated talking with you and
stops, I've seen people use that as a signal to seek out an understanding of
where the mismatch is, but in computer dialoging systems that check, and
subsequent re-framing is completely missing.

The other thing I've observed is that often a dialog system seems to try to be
'human' in its interaction but because it is a computer the user communicates
to it like a 'user' not like a human. Adding what might be relevant search
terms to the utterance as an example. For example, I listened as a person
pitched to Siri "I want pizza" and was frustrated at the response ("This is
what I've found on the web about Pizza") And added "I want Dominos Pizza"
(additional search term, vendor name). But Siri appeared stuck on being unable
to parse an acceptable language target for 'I want'.

Changing that to "Call dominos" or "Where is the nearest Dominos" works well
because it as a pre-built in answer action (Telephone call, map directions).

All of this the "level 4" version of autonomous conversations where the
computer can navigate what it is you are saying and what you expect as a
response.

------
cellis
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.

~~~
jameshart
Wait, you can go back to native 'xbox' commands?

Oh wow, you can! [https://www.howtogeek.com/265854/how-to-disable-hey-
cortana-...](https://www.howtogeek.com/265854/how-to-disable-hey-cortana-and-
use-xbox-voice-commands-on-your-xbox-one/)

Thanks, had no idea - assumed that when MS shipped that update the old kinect
voice recognition just went away. "Xbox, turn off" and "Xbox, record that"
were the two most used voice commands in our house, but "Hey cortana" never
seems to respond when you call her.

------
nanodano
Jeez, this guy gets really angry and swears for pages and pages over a stupid
little feature he doens't like.

------
downrightmike
Funny how MSFT used Cortana, sure she is a popular character, but she falls
very far away from good to deadly to us. She ends up going rampant and turns
other AIs against us. Not the most forward thinking, given where they are
taking the character.

------
ndh2
The sad thing is that the Windows 7 start menu wasn't any better. This is not
a regression, just some sort of following the tradition.

I use an old, discontinued app called Executor that I configure manually. It's
not a whole lot better in terms of matching, but, because it can be
configured, it is much better in terms of getting it to do what I want. It
definitely can't track your packages, though.

[http://www.executor.dk/](http://www.executor.dk/)

~~~
skrebbel
The Windows 8 start menu was fantastic however.

Just start typing (like you're supposed to do now), but it would search only
programs and settings pages, lightning fast. Then Cortana came and it tried to
read your mind and search the internet and it all went to shit again.

------
franzpeterfolz
Well, the Projected Delivery Date is 25th November 2017.

How do I know? Took the number and looked it up at ups.

I think, I'm not sure, but I think, if ups delivers on time. Cortana will give
you a message, stating the package will arive tomorrow right on 24th of
November. Just one day before.

Maybe John David Back will give us an update, when his package arrived.

BTW delivery times in the US are terrible compared to Germany. Next Day
delivery is the state of art. Germany is also much smaller in comparison.

------
gerdesj
It will be a while before these digital assistants work properly. None of them
work in a way that anyone can possibly call "intelligent". If I was feeling
charitable then I'd describe them as merely intrusive.

When these things do finally get their act together, we will all live in a
world that is different from the one we live in now. I hope it is a better
one.

------
drumttocs8
I just use Everything to search. It's great.

------
2close4comfort
It is the bing of personal digital assistants...

------
tehwebguy
If it’s worse than Siri that is _bad_.

I pulled my hair out one day after telling Siri a half dozen times to “remind
me about [an appointment] in two weeks”

It kept making an immediate reminder that said “appointment into weeks” - into
weeks??? When would someone even say that unless they were saying something
like “Days turn into weeks”???

------
edgarvaldes
So, anyone know how does it work? I mean, the "tracking a package in Cortana".
I'm intrigued now.

~~~
partiallypro
It usually just reads your email and shows you the packages based on that.
I've never had any problems with it.

~~~
eightysixfour
Yeah - it is pretty good at finding packages in my email that follow
conventional tracking numbers. I have personally experienced the problems
mentioned in the link when trying to add them manually though.

------
harshbutfair
If I type "lync", the default option is to run Skype for Business (Lync's
successor).

If I type "skype" the default option is to install Skype for Business, even
though I already have it installed.

It is very unintuitive. It is as bad as the search in Jira/Confluence, and
that's saying something.

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loopdoend
Why would you paste in a URL when trying to track a package and not just the
tracking number?

I mean if you have the URL just go to the URL and track your package.

I’m pretty sure Cortana was designed as a human interface and not a web
browser...

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Lewton
Have eclipse neon and eclipse oxygen installed

Slowly type out eclipse in search bar

Watch it randomly switch between the two at each character

Randomly as in, sometimes it suggests oxygen on ecl and sometimes it suggests
neon on ecl

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popeko
OP: Is that your actual tracking number? If so, I'd blur it - it may leak your
info

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modzu
it's the straw that broke the camel's back for me and windows as a desktop os.
hello again fedora :)

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xh3n1
Really really bad

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DoodleBuggy
And yet Cortana is still better than Siri.

~~~
monochromatic
Not even close.

~~~
DoodleBuggy
> Not even close.

"Searching the web for 'Knot every clothes'..."

