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>will want useful features like Cortana, predictive search, page compatibility modes, allowing websites/apps to ask for her location (e.g. Google Maps), and her
by zxcvcxz 11y ago
>will want useful features like Cortana, predictive search, page compatibility modes, allowing websites/apps to ask for her location (e.g. Google Maps), and her files to be backed up when her computer fails.
Have you ever had a grandma? My grandma literally plays solitaire and checks her email, that's it. She wants nothing to do with cortana.
I set my grandma up with Ubuntu and set the homepage of firefox to her email. I've never had a problem.
- Someone1234 11y agoMy grandma also mostly plays games and checks her email/Facebook, but she also occasionally has to search the web and has used Siri on her iPad, I don't think Cortana would be that big of a stretch to get her into (e.g. I've seen her use Siri semi-regularly to check the local weather). To be frank, she would likely be better off with a Chromebook. But unfortunately she has a few games she plays which are Windows binaries (e.g. those $5 CDs containing "2500 card games"). Cortana is no more or no less accessible than Siri.
- hfpn 11y agoThe problem with Cortona and Siri is that they process everything on remote servers while it could easily be done on a local machine. They do this to be able to save all that data (and take away your privacy). Apple saves Siri's audio for 2 years for example... not sure what Microsoft's policy is on this...
- overgryphon 11y agoAre there any existing products comparable in quality and speed to Cortana/Siri that do all of the processing locally?
- hfpn 11y agoif they would open source them, then maybe....
- urda 11y ago> The problem with Cortona and Siri is that they process everything on remote servers while it could easily be done on a local machine. Please enlighten the HN crowd and provide a reference for this claim.
- hfpn 11y agosorry I was thinking mostly about voice recognition... which would already be a big plus if it was done locally.
- sliverstorm 11y ago... could easily be done on a local machine. I think you're going to need to provide some evidence to support that. It is not intuitively obvious in the slightest, especially given how frequently Cortana/Siri/GoogleNow trip up even with a data center backing them. Seriously, if processing locally was so easy but they still wanted to steal all your data, they would crunch it locally & give results, and silently ship off the recording to an archive in parallel. Local processing is cheaper for them (bandwidth, compute) and faster for you.