6 ms·

> and why is it on by default? Because Cortana would be useless without it and that's a big user-facing feature of Windows 10.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
Something like Cortana could have been built to work locally, using your own resources. But it wasn't. This was an opportunity to say "we're not like Siri and Google Now, we respect your privacy", but instead they built something just like them.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - mejari 11y ago
    You misread their comment
    - ethanbond 11y ago
      Ah, I did. Thanks for the heads up instead of just downvoting!
- slg 11y ago
  I imagine the resource costs would be too high to really make that worthwhile. The choice is probably between bad privacy settings, a bad personal assistant, or bad battery life and disk usage. Microsoft chose the option that would likely upset the smallest group of people.
  - bhauer 11y ago
    I don't buy it. My Windows 10 machines will be Ivy Bridge, Broadwell, and soon Skylake-powered desktop processors running with gobs of excess computing capacity. Voice recognition should be feasible with this hardware, as it has been in the past with Windows 7 and Windows 8's often-ignored voice transcription feature. Furthermore, even if the performance were slightly worse, I would gladly sacrifice some performance for local execution with local data. Now, I expect that such a local agent would need to have quite a bit of fine-grained control to satisfy privacy concerns (e.g., do you agree to allow me to send your query about films in your zip code to the MSN Movies site to get showtimes?) But I feel the actual processing of the day-to-day personal assistant features is not only eminently feasible on my desktop, but most likely also on my Surface or laptop. The cloud is pernicious and voracious, its dominion grows quickly enough without needlessly exaggerating the necessity of offloading computation like this. Local computing devices—especially those that conventionally run Windows (desktop PCs and laptops)—are extremely capable. Cortana is a cloud agent not because of requisite processing power. Illusory local processing deficiency is just a convenient justification for why it doesn't run locally. But then, I am a strong advocate of personal compute servers and mainstreaming secure private networks. So I am obviously fringe in today's culture that embraces the centralized cloud.
    - freehunter 11y ago
      You know they sell things like the Surface 3 using an Intel i3 processor, and still sell Windows tablets with Atom processors, right? Just because you have a 12-core i7 with 320GB of RAM doesn't mean every Windows machine does.
      - bhauer 11y ago
        Well, like I said, Windows 7 and 8 had voice transcription support built-in and it worked well on my old computers from 2009, with plenty of CPU capacity to spare. I expect a modern i3 would probably match my desktop i7 from '09.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I agree with you with everything except the expectation of performance of your desktop - you're underestimating the ever-growing bloat. Faster hardware is just an excuse for businesses to include more useless shi^H^H^Hvalue-added features and a way to speed up their delivery by caring about performance even less. WRT cloud, we've already reached the point of ridicule with the new generation of Internet-connected hardware. So many useless webapps (er, "value-added cloud analytics platforms") and so many devices sitting centimeters from each other but communicating all the way around the world. There is absolutely no engineering reason for it to look that way - it's all just attempts to milk users by making them depend on cloud services.
    - sudioStudio64 11y ago
      It actually does run locally with access to API's that you authorize. Just saying...
      - bhauer 11y ago
        Interesting. Is it easy to "firewall" Cortana so that it does local voice processing and connects only to external services you authorize?
        sudioStudio64 11y ago
- sudioStudio64 11y ago
  But the entire point of the service was to use data mining techniques so that you could use natural language directives to say "add a reminder to my team's calendar to update some presentation in O365, etc"... Maybe you don't find it that useful, but I think that a lot of people would. It will, in a future release, be genuinely useful. It's getting there.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    All of which could be done locally. There's certainly no shortage of processing power available to do so. All of those services have APIs.
    - jda0 11y ago
      Josh, maybe you don't get how difficult Speech Recognition is now that it comes as standard in your smartphone, but they use Google/Apple (delete as appropriate) servers for a reason. There's a reason people were amazed at the response time of Cortana - local speech recognition that doesn't hog the processor is a big deal. And connecting to O365 calendars offline? Is that not a stupid concept?
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        I'm well aware of how phones handle speech recognition; there are reasons they do so via services that have little to do with the computational difficulty of speech recognition. It's not by any means necessary to upload raw voice data to a server and process it there, especially if we're talking about full computers rather than just phones. > And connecting to O365 calendars offline? Is that not a stupid concept? I said "local", not "offline". Though in any case, you should likely have a locally synced cache of your calendar for efficiency and the ability to read it offline. Web apps are quite capable of working while offline.
        chc 11y ago
        > we're talking about full computers Worth mentioning: Windows 10 is not just for "full computers."
sudioStudio64 11y ago
I know. I think it's actually pretty cool. (Though it doesn't seem to work well with some builtin mic's.) I really like the direction they are headed.
koenigdavidmj 11y ago
How about a box that shows up the first time you try to invoke Cortana, asking if you want to turn this feature on.
- talmand 11y ago
  I made a similar suggestion in a somewhat related topic concerning browsers and was told this is bad UX so it shouldn't be done. Informing people of what's going on and giving them power over their choices is bad UX. Somehow.
  - koenigdavidmj 11y ago
    UX people can't seem to agree on much of anything. On environments where permissions must be explicitly granted (like iOS), I've seen articles saying to go both ways: "ask for everything right at the start", and "ask immediately before use".
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - ethanbond 11y ago
      > UX people can't seem to agree on much of anything. It's almost as if "UX people" isn't referring to "UX person." Go to Stack Overflow and the vast majority of questions have multiple answers, as if "programmer people" can't agree on much of anything.
- sudioStudio64 11y ago
  There are dialogs and UI hints that come up when the service is first accessed. Is it enough to placate someone who is seriously concerned with online privacy...probably not. It meets the minimum requirements to not be too sneaky.
- bargl 11y ago
  If you have a local account you have to sign into a microsoft account (changing from local) to get Cortana.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

Something like Cortana could have been built to work locally, using your own resources. But it wasn't. This was an opportunity to say "we're not like Siri and Google Now, we respect your privacy", but instead they built something just like them.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- mejari 11y ago
  You misread their comment
  - ethanbond 11y ago
    Ah, I did. Thanks for the heads up instead of just downvoting!
slg 11y ago
I imagine the resource costs would be too high to really make that worthwhile. The choice is probably between bad privacy settings, a bad personal assistant, or bad battery life and disk usage. Microsoft chose the option that would likely upset the smallest group of people.
- bhauer 11y ago
  I don't buy it. My Windows 10 machines will be Ivy Bridge, Broadwell, and soon Skylake-powered desktop processors running with gobs of excess computing capacity. Voice recognition should be feasible with this hardware, as it has been in the past with Windows 7 and Windows 8's often-ignored voice transcription feature. Furthermore, even if the performance were slightly worse, I would gladly sacrifice some performance for local execution with local data. Now, I expect that such a local agent would need to have quite a bit of fine-grained control to satisfy privacy concerns (e.g., do you agree to allow me to send your query about films in your zip code to the MSN Movies site to get showtimes?) But I feel the actual processing of the day-to-day personal assistant features is not only eminently feasible on my desktop, but most likely also on my Surface or laptop. The cloud is pernicious and voracious, its dominion grows quickly enough without needlessly exaggerating the necessity of offloading computation like this. Local computing devices—especially those that conventionally run Windows (desktop PCs and laptops)—are extremely capable. Cortana is a cloud agent not because of requisite processing power. Illusory local processing deficiency is just a convenient justification for why it doesn't run locally. But then, I am a strong advocate of personal compute servers and mainstreaming secure private networks. So I am obviously fringe in today's culture that embraces the centralized cloud.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    You know they sell things like the Surface 3 using an Intel i3 processor, and still sell Windows tablets with Atom processors, right? Just because you have a 12-core i7 with 320GB of RAM doesn't mean every Windows machine does.
    - bhauer 11y ago
      Well, like I said, Windows 7 and 8 had voice transcription support built-in and it worked well on my old computers from 2009, with plenty of CPU capacity to spare. I expect a modern i3 would probably match my desktop i7 from '09.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I agree with you with everything except the expectation of performance of your desktop - you're underestimating the ever-growing bloat. Faster hardware is just an excuse for businesses to include more useless shi^H^H^Hvalue-added features and a way to speed up their delivery by caring about performance even less. WRT cloud, we've already reached the point of ridicule with the new generation of Internet-connected hardware. So many useless webapps (er, "value-added cloud analytics platforms") and so many devices sitting centimeters from each other but communicating all the way around the world. There is absolutely no engineering reason for it to look that way - it's all just attempts to milk users by making them depend on cloud services.
  - sudioStudio64 11y ago
    It actually does run locally with access to API's that you authorize. Just saying...
    - bhauer 11y ago
      Interesting. Is it easy to "firewall" Cortana so that it does local voice processing and connects only to external services you authorize?
      - sudioStudio64 11y ago
sudioStudio64 11y ago
But the entire point of the service was to use data mining techniques so that you could use natural language directives to say "add a reminder to my team's calendar to update some presentation in O365, etc"... Maybe you don't find it that useful, but I think that a lot of people would. It will, in a future release, be genuinely useful. It's getting there.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  All of which could be done locally. There's certainly no shortage of processing power available to do so. All of those services have APIs.
  - jda0 11y ago
    Josh, maybe you don't get how difficult Speech Recognition is now that it comes as standard in your smartphone, but they use Google/Apple (delete as appropriate) servers for a reason. There's a reason people were amazed at the response time of Cortana - local speech recognition that doesn't hog the processor is a big deal. And connecting to O365 calendars offline? Is that not a stupid concept?
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      I'm well aware of how phones handle speech recognition; there are reasons they do so via services that have little to do with the computational difficulty of speech recognition. It's not by any means necessary to upload raw voice data to a server and process it there, especially if we're talking about full computers rather than just phones. > And connecting to O365 calendars offline? Is that not a stupid concept? I said "local", not "offline". Though in any case, you should likely have a locally synced cache of your calendar for efficiency and the ability to read it offline. Web apps are quite capable of working while offline.
      - chc 11y ago
        > we're talking about full computers Worth mentioning: Windows 10 is not just for "full computers."

sudioStudio64 11y ago

I know. I think it's actually pretty cool. (Though it doesn't seem to work well with some builtin mic's.) I really like the direction they are headed.

koenigdavidmj 11y ago

How about a box that shows up the first time you try to invoke Cortana, asking if you want to turn this feature on.

talmand 11y ago
I made a similar suggestion in a somewhat related topic concerning browsers and was told this is bad UX so it shouldn't be done. Informing people of what's going on and giving them power over their choices is bad UX. Somehow.
- koenigdavidmj 11y ago
  UX people can't seem to agree on much of anything. On environments where permissions must be explicitly granted (like iOS), I've seen articles saying to go both ways: "ask for everything right at the start", and "ask immediately before use".
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ethanbond 11y ago
    > UX people can't seem to agree on much of anything. It's almost as if "UX people" isn't referring to "UX person." Go to Stack Overflow and the vast majority of questions have multiple answers, as if "programmer people" can't agree on much of anything.
sudioStudio64 11y ago
There are dialogs and UI hints that come up when the service is first accessed. Is it enough to placate someone who is seriously concerned with online privacy...probably not. It meets the minimum requirements to not be too sneaky.
bargl 11y ago
If you have a local account you have to sign into a microsoft account (changing from local) to get Cortana.