10 ms·

Upcoming changes to Cortana

73 points by waltherp 6y ago

justix12 6y ago
Will it still work on my Zune?
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  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.
  - evilos 6y ago
    Anytime I see someone mention the Zune it is always followed by what you just said. And then someone does what I am doing now.
    - OrangeKnucles 6y ago
      and what's the reply to comment like yours?
    - Igelau 6y ago
      We are all connected in the great Circle of Zune.
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    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.
    - doctor_eval 6y ago
      Oldie but a goodie https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k
    - myopenid4 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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 6y ago
        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.
    - addicted 6y ago
      The Zune was flashy and sexy looking, but the text on the screen was so large that it conveyed a fraction of the information an iPod screen did in a much smaller size. All the backgrounds and all were also distracting. It was also huge compared to contemporary iPods. From what I remember, one of the few nice features were the sharing capabilities, where you could Zune songs you had bought over to friends, but those only worked Zune to Zune, so to actually avail that feature it had to first become popular enough that you would frequently meet people who also owned a Zune. The Zune wasn’t a bad device. It was just too little too late. And the iPhone introduced less than a year later (and the obvious iPod touch that everyone knew was coming) meant that it was all over for the Zune before it even had a chance to get started.
culturestate 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - dan1234 6y ago
    The only thing I regularly use Siri for is timers, where it’s genuinely quicker to say “15 minute timer” than it is to open the app.
    - BuckRogers 6y ago
      Same here. And Alexa (Amazon Cube) is really relegated to muting my TV, lowering/raising the volume, and turning TVs off. If I install some outdoor cameras I might use it to check the front door, back yard or (if I had a child) the baby room. As a Windows user I never found a use for Cortana. Alexa is the only one that turned out remotely useful for me.
    - aasasd 6y ago
saagarjha 6y ago
From today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24013304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24013304
thunkshift1 6y ago
Good riddance!!
aasasd 6y ago
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.
- Igelau 6y ago
  We would like to reiterate that we have not sent Cortana to the glue factory!
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  >Also in 2021, Cortana in Surface Headphones will continue pivoting toward its mission to help customers with productivity throughout their day. ... By shutting it down? Maybe they found out people were only using it to slack off
- zenexer 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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?"
- chris_wot 6y ago
  > As we make this shift toward a transformational AI-powered assistant experience in Microsoft 365, we need to adjust our focus areas of innovation and development to give our customers assistance where they need it most. As a result, we are making changes to some U.S. consumer-centric features and functionalities with lower usage. I can’t even parse that last line. “Making changes [to functionality] with lower usage.” Does that mean that it is less used? Or does that mean they are lowering usage?
moooo99 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
m0zg 6y ago
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".
- Closi 6y ago
  The other use case is text message dictation while driving - which is excellent. These types of system can’t be released “only when perfect” unfortunately as they need many iterations with real world data.
- sradman 6y ago
  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.
  - chris_wot 6y ago
    Sure, but what did the voice assistants ever do for us?
  - hakfoo 6y ago
    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.
nige123 6y ago
So does that mean if you created a third party action word (skill) it's game over?
nintendo1889 6y ago
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.
slowmovintarget 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
Aaronn 6y ago
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
fortran77 6y ago
Cortana worked pretty well--better than Siri, though not as good as Alexa.

73 points by waltherp 6y ago

justix12 6y ago

Will it still work on my Zune?

29athrowaway 6y ago
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.
- evilos 6y ago
  Anytime I see someone mention the Zune it is always followed by what you just said. And then someone does what I am doing now.
  - OrangeKnucles 6y ago
    and what's the reply to comment like yours?
  - Igelau 6y ago
    We are all connected in the great Circle of Zune.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  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.
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    Oldie but a goodie https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k
  - myopenid4 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
  - addicted 6y ago
    The Zune was flashy and sexy looking, but the text on the screen was so large that it conveyed a fraction of the information an iPod screen did in a much smaller size. All the backgrounds and all were also distracting. It was also huge compared to contemporary iPods. From what I remember, one of the few nice features were the sharing capabilities, where you could Zune songs you had bought over to friends, but those only worked Zune to Zune, so to actually avail that feature it had to first become popular enough that you would frequently meet people who also owned a Zune. The Zune wasn’t a bad device. It was just too little too late. And the iPhone introduced less than a year later (and the obvious iPod touch that everyone knew was coming) meant that it was all over for the Zune before it even had a chance to get started.

culturestate 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
- dan1234 6y ago
  The only thing I regularly use Siri for is timers, where it’s genuinely quicker to say “15 minute timer” than it is to open the app.
  - BuckRogers 6y ago
    Same here. And Alexa (Amazon Cube) is really relegated to muting my TV, lowering/raising the volume, and turning TVs off. If I install some outdoor cameras I might use it to check the front door, back yard or (if I had a child) the baby room. As a Windows user I never found a use for Cortana. Alexa is the only one that turned out remotely useful for me.
  - aasasd 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago

From today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24013304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24013304

thunkshift1 6y ago

Good riddance!!

aasasd 6y ago

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.

Igelau 6y ago
We would like to reiterate that we have not sent Cortana to the glue factory!
thatguy0900 6y ago
>Also in 2021, Cortana in Surface Headphones will continue pivoting toward its mission to help customers with productivity throughout their day. ... By shutting it down? Maybe they found out people were only using it to slack off
zenexer 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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?"
chris_wot 6y ago
> As we make this shift toward a transformational AI-powered assistant experience in Microsoft 365, we need to adjust our focus areas of innovation and development to give our customers assistance where they need it most. As a result, we are making changes to some U.S. consumer-centric features and functionalities with lower usage. I can’t even parse that last line. “Making changes [to functionality] with lower usage.” Does that mean that it is less used? Or does that mean they are lowering usage?

moooo99 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.

m0zg 6y ago

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".

Closi 6y ago
The other use case is text message dictation while driving - which is excellent. These types of system can’t be released “only when perfect” unfortunately as they need many iterations with real world data.
sradman 6y ago
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.
- chris_wot 6y ago
  Sure, but what did the voice assistants ever do for us?
- hakfoo 6y ago
  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.

nige123 6y ago

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

nintendo1889 6y ago

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.

slowmovintarget 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.

Aaronn 6y ago

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

fortran77 6y ago

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