Microsoft's Andrew Shuman on the Cortana App's Death, Natural Language, and Alexa (venturebeat.com) 30
An anonymous reader writes: Last month, news broke that Microsoft was killing off Cortana for Android and iOS and was removing Cortana from its Launcher app for Android. On January 31, 2020, Microsoft will end support for the Cortana app in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K. Microsoft refocusing Cortana for the enterprise, and specifically for Windows and Office, is not new. Nonetheless, killing off the Cortana app was a bold move. VentureBeat sat down with Andrew Shuman, who has been leading the Cortana team since Javier Soltero's departure last year, to find out why Cortana for Android and iOS is being killed off, what to expect with Cortana for Windows, his thoughts on natural language and typing, what's going on with the Alexa integration, and more.
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Are you sure you qualify as a person and that you are not some automated long tail revenue stream bot?
Last month, news broke that Microsoft was killing off Cortana for Android and iOS
When is that ceremier guy going to finally kill his spamming software?
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"I am the first person to post a comment here"
You could have at least said:
'My condolences for Cortana's death'
Or more appropriately here:
'It's dead, Jim.'
Entreprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope that means they're walking away from a vocal interface then - the last thing anyone needs at work is the incessant clamoring of people talking to computers and computers talking to people.
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Cortana is a modern Clippy (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you have ever installed Windows 10 or logged on to the first time to a PC with Windows 10, you have been involuntarily subjected to a tutorial on what Cortana is.
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If you have ever installed Windows 10 or logged on to the first time to a PC with Windows 10, you have been involuntarily subjected to a tutorial on what Cortana is.
Apparently there are exceptions to that. I was just handed a Win10 laptop less than a week ago and I never saw one. I suppose it's possible that the IT guy who installed it was subjected to the tutorial so I never saw it. I've only heard rumors of what Cortana is in the Win10 context -- as opposed to the Halo context where she was useful to the game. :)
Voice to text (Score:4, Funny)
is done so well on Android... but with Windows it's like visiting my cousin who rode the short bus and then took several blows to the head. I'm not sure I'm not speaking clearly, if my mic is garbage, or if the translation is just lost somewhere in Windows' wonky head that it spits back out the garbage it does. Cortana was no exception. It's just another market that MS entered half-heartedly and they don't want to invest in fixing it.
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I think Cortana was a Ballmer idea, IIRC it first debuted on the Windows Phone OS. Like almost all Ballmer ideas it's best consigned to the trash heap while MS gets back to making software that runs the world.
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M$ software no longer runs the world, Linux runs the world, M$ Windows is the app sitting on top running M$ Office. Servers, terminals, appliances, mobile devices, network interfaces, the internet, LINUX runs the world, windows anal probe 10 is just the slowing dying desktop app, dominant in the shrinking market of desktops, a tiny fraction of the overall computer market. There are more Linux smart phones than there are windows anal probe 10 desktops, probably an order of magnitude more by now.
M$ dominates
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It's not exactly 'trial and error'. It's "let the entire software industry function as your R&D department - then copy and steal the successes". Except that no longer works so well for them since the OS is no longer the only way to achieve universal (or near universal) deployment. Hence the 'error' in the case of Cortana - which, were we still in pre-Internet times, would have succeeded 'brilliantly'.
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By 'brilliantly', by the way, I mean - survive as a cute, useless parlor trick - like Siri. I'll admit, though, that Google's voice recognition is pretty amazing at this point. I am guilty of using it occasionally - rather than typing on a shitty touchscreen keyboard. But that's not what Cortana was meant to be. It was yet another attempt to make Bing people's default search engine - nothing more, and nothing less.
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Cortana is the product of the old Microsoft's mantra, "if something is successful anywhere in the software realm, Microsoft must do it too - and incorporate it into its monopoly ecosystem, lest that monopoly somehow lose its grip".
What concerns me in this article is talk about Alexa integration, which reeks of the 'new' Microsoft's mantra, "if Google does something, we must work with their rivals to hobble them, even if we don't come out on top - lest Google retain the power to push the Microsoft monopoly a
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While I'm no fan of Microsoft, I'm a bit more concerned about Google's efforts to take over, well, basically everything. So I'm not super concerned about Microsoft trying to hobble Google, in a enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend sort of way.
Unless you meant that you're concerned about Amazon also trying to take over, well, basically everything. Which is understandable.
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Actually, the idea isn't a bad one. Voice assistants, while I don't like them, are popular, and including one with Windows isn't a terrible idea. It's just the implementation was garbage, as well as trying to shove it down user's throats as opposed to just creating it and allowing users to use or not use it as they choose.
The other problem they now have, in the typical Microsoft fashion - is instead of improving Cortana they're killing it off. Which means if in the future if Microsoft decides to take ano
What about Windows 10 (Score:3)
I would really like to see Cortana disappear from Windows 10 as well.
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Me too. My PC doesn't have a microphone ( or a camera) so Cortana is wasted memory or HD space.
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Please also remove Cortana from Windows (Score:1)
Nobody wants your shitty malware.
End of an Era (Score:2)
Dang. I can only assume this means no more Halo games. What else could it possibly mean? So sad...
Windows Phone (Score:2)
By far the biggest loss of Cortana was with respect to the Windows Phone. With my Windows Phone connected to my car's Bluetooth, I would be notified by voice if I received a text message, given the opportunity to have it read to me and then given the opportunity to voice respond which it would read back to me and give me the opportunity to edit and then sent back to the originator as a text message. All without any special setup or physical contact with my phone. Then one day Microsoft killed the server sid