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Microsoft AI

Microsoft's Cortana Drops Consumer Skills as it Refocuses on Business Users (techcrunch.com) 48

Posted by msmash from the tough-choices dept.
With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft's Cortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skills. From a report: That's very much in line with Microsoft's new focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans. Microsoft is also turning off Cortana support in its Microsoft Launcher on Android by the end of April and on older versions of Windows that have reached their end-of-service date, which usually comes about 36 months after the original release. As the company explained last year, it now mostly thinks of Cortana as a service for business users. The new Cortana is all about productivity, with deep integrations into Microsoft's suite of Office tools, for example. In this context, consumer services are only a distraction, and Microsoft is leaving that market to the likes of Amazon and Google .
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Microsoft's Cortana Drops Consumer Skills as it Refocuses on Business Users More

Microsoft's Cortana Drops Consumer Skills as it Refocuses on Business Users

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  • So what's new? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by IMarvinTPA ( 104941 ) <IMarvinTPA.IMarvinTPA@com> on Saturday February 29, 2020 @03:02AM (#59781166) Homepage Journal

    The preview doesn't say which new skills were released.

    Oh, you mean the old definition of dropped, they got rid of them all.

    Damn it, media. Pick a definition for dropped and stick with it!

    • Dropped is our latest auto-antonym, like cleave and sanction.

      • Ok exactly how many businesses....especially the US govt. is wanting to use Cortana....something that is actively recording and reporting back to MS.

        Seems a huge security red flag just by its very presence.P Exactly who in business is wanting this functionality at all, much less have it turned on on their networks?

    • When it's coming from Microsoft, dropped means dumped. Whenever they've screwed up a product to the extent that user levels have tanked completely, they remarket it as "for business" in an attempt to keep it alive. Unlike businesses, consumers have to choose to use somethiing, and given what a sucking chest wound things like Skype and Cortana have turned into, consumers are choosing not to use them. Thus the dumping of the product by making it "for business", where you get it rammed down your throat as p

  • Ha ha (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday February 29, 2020 @03:25AM (#59781184)

    ”That's very much in line with Microsoft's new focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans.” (emphasis mine)

    I gotta admit - that made me laugh out loud.

    • I was thinking the same. Why the plural?

    • Ayup - I can't imagine any serious business having Cortana enabled, so MS will have an uphill battle with this thing.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday February 29, 2020 @04:02AM (#59781234)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Saturday February 29, 2020 @04:42AM (#59781270)

      Probably because if the skill "exists" people will be expecting Microsoft to support it. They can't just leave it there and not do anything, because then every time a skill develops an issue people will be complaining on the forums about it, and then complaining more when Microsoft responds that that they wont fix it and why, etc. Just removing the skill gets all that out of the way and avoids a perpetuity of support requests from people every time a skill starts having issues due to changes in other software.

    • The backroom full of people answering Cortana questions is the expensive part of supporting Cortana. Why not let them focus on the business user, where they make their real money. Makes sense to me.

    • Why does Cortana have to lose skills? Is there some magic upper limit on the amount of skills it can posses?

      I think the developers were swayed by this exhaustive study [youtube.com].

  • In other words ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Saturday February 29, 2020 @04:23AM (#59781244)
    ... consumers aren't using this turd as much as M$ hoped they would even though it was forced down their throats.
    • Originally Cortana was probably intended mostly for Windows Phone OS. They failed at mobile, but I can't say I'm glad. The resulting duopoly isn't quite enough competitors.

      One specific niggle relevant to this story - it drives me nuts that OK Google won't play a song from local storage. Lots of people want this, google could easily do it, but they won't let us have that because they have to force everything back online through their ad cloud.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The dozens of Cortana fans are appalled (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday February 29, 2020 @04:41AM (#59781264)

    All 24 of them.

    • It’s worse than Clippy. You could remove Clippy. Cortana can only be “disabled” and only in the loosest definition of that. It runs in the background every now and then even though it’s supposed to be off. If you have your sound mixer options open you can see “Microsoft Speech Runtime” running trying to access your microphone and sound. That’s Cortana even though you have disabled and turned off access to the microphone.
  • It is basically the new clippy.

  • 640 skills (Score:3, Funny)

    by indytx ( 825419 ) on Saturday February 29, 2020 @05:53AM (#59781322)

    640 skills ought to be enough for anybody.

  • What you have never used. I turn it off on every installation and remove it from the task bar.

    • Coming soon: A great new feature from Microsoft... Cortana is always there ready to work for you.
      The downside is that you can't kill it.

      I would not put it past MS to do this.... just because they can.

  • So, has Microsoft successfully expanded into even one new technology in the past 20 years or so?

    Everyone has failures now and again; but with MS, they seem to be the rule, rather than the exception.

    • So, has Microsoft successfully expanded into even one new technology in the past 20 years or so?

      Everyone has failures now and again; but with MS, they seem to be the rule, rather than the exception.

      I was thinking exactly that! It's almost as if Microsoft doesn't compete anymore. If they enter into a market segment and meet any resistance that requires innovation, they're out.

      Long term the PC is going to decline in importance and Microsoft has precious few other ways to make money. But more importantly, by the looks of things they aren't what they were.

    • Azure I quite successful
  • After many years I had to use Win 10 - at work, they upgraded from Win 7. Same HW, same SSD.

    Its as useful or useless like Win 7, but slower than Win 7. Simple actions like calling a binary like Winzip takes far more time on Win 10 than on Win 7. I have no idea why!

    And after four months I have not seen Cortana...maybe they disabled in a corp IT environment.

    I am typing this on a Linux Mint...the stablest system I have seen in my life.

    • You may have Windows Enterprise LTSC, which is supposed to be "stable" version of Windows 10 for Enterprise customers who don't want to deal with Microsoft constantly changing things with their updates and just want security patches. With LTSC Cortana and even Edge are optional which might be why you haven't had to deal with Cortana.

      Naturally, this makes LTSC the version of Window 10 to have if you need to run Windows, but Microsoft won't sell it retail, only through volume licenses.

  • There is nothing more obnoxious than Cortana in the office when someone opens a new win10 laptop. Nobody wants that fucking shit.

  • Looking back a decade or more, Microsoft used to count on its loyal cadre of Windows administrators to wholeheartedly buy into their sales pitch - whatever it was - and could be sure any new tool they wanted to push would get widely deployed and talked up by those admins to the masses. They basically had a ubiquitous, free PR team. I saw it happen numerous times... it’s why substandard tools like IIS and especially ActiveX became so pervasive for so long, and probably was still the case when OneDrive

  • Cortana is not worth the loss of privacy and should be disabled by every consumer. It is an awful product. It's more acceptable for Corp users because most users have little expectation of privacy on a corp-owned asset. I'm surprised M$ took this long to figure this out.
  • According to most reports, Cortana is significantly more stupid than Alexa and Google Assistant - who are both fairly useless.
  • And like every other piece of Microsoft bloatware, itâ(TM)s stuck on my laptop until the end of time continuously asking for ones and zeros.

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