
Upcoming changes to Cortana - waltherp
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4575625/upcoming-changes-to-cortana
======
aasasd
Love current PR lingo. Just shove self-praise into every piece of
communication.

> _Cortana is continuing to redefine the nature of a digital assistant, ...
> accelerating productivity to help save you time and focus on the things that
> matter most_

> _The first change is to end support for all third-party Cortana skills_

> _Cortana in Surface Headphones will continue pivoting toward its mission to
> help customers with productivity throughout their day. We’ll be removing
> support for the previous version of Cortana in the first version of Surface
> Headphones_

So much acceleration, wow.

~~~
zenexer
My favorite:

> As we make this shift toward a transformational AI-powered assistant
> experience in Microsoft 365...

While I’m sure there’s a world of difference, I couldn’t help but chuckle at
the thought of Clippy making a comeback. “transformational AI-powered
assistant experience in Microsoft 365” certainly sounds like a PR-enhanced
description of Clippy.

~~~
GordonS
Hah, it sounds more like Clippy wrote this PR puff piece!

I can just imagine PR Clippy...

"It looks like you're trying to write spin, can I help you with that?"

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culturestate
To clarify, they aren't shutting down Cortana completely - they're ending
support for the standalone Cortana apps, which makes sense. What I find more
interesting is how they're handling their smart speaker partnership:

 _> ...we’ve worked closely with Harman Kardon to create a Bluetooth-enabled
device transition plan that we hope will help ease the impact of this change.
Customers who receive a firmware update from Harman Kardon in early 2021 will
still be able to continue listening...on their Invoke via Bluetooth._

If I'm reading this correctly, they're basically saying "very few people
really use this as a 'smart' speaker, so we'll just turn it into a normal
Bluetooth speaker and move on." I'm not sure whether that says more about
Cortana or about the smart speaker market, but it seems like an...ok
compromise? Certainly better than just bricking the thing.

~~~
mrweasel
I think very few use the voice feature, but those who do will hate losing it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that only a few percent of iPhone
users uses Siri.

The hype surrounding digital voice assistants have died out. It’s still useful
in a few situations, but not having one isn’t as huge a defeat as it would
have been 5 years ago. Microsoft could drop Cortana completely and be fine.

~~~
pjmlp
I never bother with such devices, because they hardly ever support European
Portuguese properly and I am not going to speak foreign languages at home just
to make a device happy.

~~~
frereubu
I'm a British English speaker, and about 15 years ago I spent an afternoon
experimenting with the basic voice recognition on OSX. I found that I had to
mimic a US or Australian accent to get it to work, and I wondered what my
next-door neighbours were thinking when they heard me cycle repeatedly through
"Give me the phone number for Firstname Lastname" with British, US and
Australian accents.

~~~
GordonS
Scot here, I have this problem with telephone voice menus. Actually, I've also
had this problem in the US as well, particularly while on the telephone.
Putting on a fake US accent seems to work, but it's so damn embarrassing and I
guess could be construed as offensive by some people (if they thought I was
taking the piss).

I had the same issue recently with a BMW voice activation system I was playing
with. Mimicking an _English_ accent worked for that one!

------
moooo99
While they're at it, why don't they include Windows 10 on that list?

I haven't met a single person that uses Cortana and those who tried are
usually not coming back. For me Cortana has basically no useful features
(maybe its because of my language settings), its just software bloat and in
addition to that, its a privacy nightmare. The only association I have with
Cortana is it screaming at me when I do a clean install of Windows 10, which
is a thing of the past thanks to my switch to macOS.

~~~
superasn
Worst part is it keeps running in the background hogging memory and cpu even
when completely disabled. I've tried gpedit, shutup10 and so many other tools
to get rid of it but somehow it comes back every time :/

~~~
Kuinox
The start menu, that need to index your files in background, or do other
stuff, is named "cortana".

I don't think you want to disable this "cortana".

~~~
stallmanite
Serious question for better programmers than me: Doesn’t it violate seperation
of concerns that something like the start menu that has a specific function
and has been around for decades get smashed into the Cortana code and renamed.
Cortana is clearly not core to the functionality of the start menu and if it
became so it surely wasn’t out of necessity right?

It reminds me of when Microsoft was dead set on conflating the file manager
“explorer” and Internet Explorer.

Can someone justify this?

~~~
Kuinox
It's like monolith and micro services.

From the programming standpoint, a monolith can be splitted in components, but
compiled/bundled/linked to a single executable. This doesn't violate the
seperation of concern. It's bad taste/marketing/whatever.

I checked on my Windows and they did separate Cortana and the Search/Start
menu recently.

------
slowmovintarget
The general problem with all "AI-powered assistants" is that they're not AI-
powered assistants. They are voice interfaces atop tiny libraries of
utilities.

If I had an AI powered assistant, it's actual data would be on my system, and
not out on the internet somewhere. It wouldn't need to send my speech out.

But further, it would actually be an assistant. It would be able to operate
all the applications on my computer.

"Cortana, copy the last three Slack messages in the current channel to a new
Box document. Call it Requirements and add the date." -> Uses two separate
apps for which I have open sessions, can exercise my credentials (where I
complete the MFA when needed).

"Cortana, search all my communications for things related to Bob. I need to
trace all of his activities that I have record for. Include Sumologic logs for
the applications I support." -> Searches chat logs, email, and web application
logs out in my log collection.

"Cortana, find out from Mom what groceries she needs today, and place
Instacart orders accordingly."

The "assistants" we have today can't combine actions. They are just isolated
pools of menu selections. They can't replace hands-on-keyboard for the things
I regularly need to do with my computers or devices. They need to become
intention-processors, not just language parsers to activate a menu.

~~~
xemoka
And not even good ones at that. They never take negative re-enforcement, you
can't tell them what they just did was wrong or report a problem. You can't
say "Good Bot" and let it know that the response it gave was what you expected
and to continue to return results similar. Hell, if it was just 'stupid' you
could keep programming new features into it and new ways to get to the same
features with slightly different wording. But no. We don't even get that. Just
this awful black box that "sometimes does what it's asked" and can barely
reference previous incantations. Uhg.

------
m0zg
Other than for setting timers and turning the lights on and off, all of this
"voice assisted" stuff doesn't really work. So providers should either make it
work or abandon it if they can't (and yes, they can't), leaving only the
scenarios that do work operational. Kudos to Microsoft - they're admitting
what was obvious to everyone for quite a while.

This is especially egregious with Siri, which Apple repeatedly tries to
gaslight everyone about. Apple does demos every year, yet Siri continues to
suck just as it always did. But Apple keeps pretending that it doesn't suck.
This goes completely against the ethos of Apple not releasing stuff until it's
"insanely great".

~~~
sradman
Yes, other than timers, reminders, delivery notifications, home automation,
weather, music/podcast playback, Bluetooth speaker, unit conversion, and
grocery items (e.g. OurGroceries), voice assistants are useless.

~~~
hakfoo
The big hurdle for voice UI is discoverability.

That's probably why it's most successful in a handful of verticals, like
timers and music control. There are a finite list of likely commands, and
people can probably guess them first time.

When you move much beyond that, you start getting a high miss rate because
there's no good way to pull a list of valid commands or options.

Importantly, especially for home automation, "option guessability" is a big
thing-- you might know the commands, but the relevant options are specific to
each location, and you were likely not there when it was configured. How do
you know that the light fixtures are named "Left sconce, right sconce, ceiling
fan, and table lamp", and not "north, south, Bob, and Matilda?"

Voice UI is also a terrible situation for error recovery. I can't figure out a
voice-only UI that would handle a simple case like "which light do you want to
turn on?" well. At best, it could read you a list of all the devices that
might be relevant for the question, but that's so low information-density and
will feel like a bad telephone IVR service.

The "Siri with a screen" design convention might have been sensible, as that
would have provided a way to disambiguate queries quickly, with buttons to
show the options, and at idle, a browsable list of supported commands.

Of course, at that point, you're making a more obvious machine with a (voice-
based) command-line. That's shatters the illusion they're selling of this
being your secretary/concierge, with arbitrary and broad capabilities, who
happens to be a robot.

------
Aaronn
If you own Microsoft Surface Headphones you can get a $25 gift card from them:
[https://www.bing.com/surfaceheadphoneredemption](https://www.bing.com/surfaceheadphoneredemption)

Also a $50 gift card if you own the Harman Kardon Invoke speakers:
[https://www.bing.com/cortanainvokeredemption](https://www.bing.com/cortanainvokeredemption)

Pretty crappy that the links to these are buried in the FAQ

------
saagarjha
From today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24013304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24013304)

------
nige123
So does that mean if you created a third party action word (skill) it's game
over?

------
fortran77
Cortana worked pretty well--better than Siri, though not as good as Alexa.

------
justix12
Will it still work on my Zune?

~~~
29athrowaway
People made fun of the Zune but if you look at it objectively it was actually
a good product for its time.

The timing and the marketing was perhaps not as good as the product itself.

~~~
iforgotpassword
I agree though. Maybe except the first or maybe second release, these were
kinda rushed and really just reskinned Toshiba devices.

Microsoft is surprisingly good at designing hardware and devices, and
surprisingly bad at marketing them. Just like with Windows Phone, they were
late to the party but acted like they already own the market. (I guess you
just can't help yourself if you dominate the desktop OS market that much.)
Both times they added unnecessary restrictions to the devices and set the
pricing relatively high. You can do this if you're Apple and created the whole
market and are generally known as a premium brand, but MS just isn't.

~~~
myopenid4
Their hardware sucks, just like their software. This is from a person who went
from Nokia Symbian, to Microsoft's Nokia and finally the dead Windows Phone.

They somehow managed to take Nokia with their amazing hardware (look at Nokia
N9, N900 and Maemo) and turn it into pure garbage (Microsoft Lumia series and
their POS Windows Phone 10).

~~~
iforgotpassword
Completely different experience for me. Symbian was a confusing mess, so much
that I stayed with a feature phone for another while. WP8 felt responsive, the
UI consistent and surprisingly clean. Scrolling was smooth in 2013 when on
Android it had frequent stuttering except maybe the flagship devices. The
problem was that it was missing all the important apps and then some. They
made sure to set the bar high for starting to develop apps for it and then
wondered why nobody started porting to WP.

~~~
myopenid4
Nokia was in the process of switching from Symbian to Maemo, but Microsoft
installed a Trojan of a Stephen Elop and forced the crap that is Windows Phone
down Nokia's throat.

------
nintendo1889
One of the assistant's could stand out if they allow 3rd party devs to use it
and allow an incognito mode. Otherwise it's just a way for them to collect
data^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbig brother us.

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thunkshift1
Good riddance!!

