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Cortana Can Now Replace Google Now On Android Devices

Posted by timothy on from the heterodox-approach dept.

The Verge reports that Microsoft's Cortana can now be used (at least for beta testers) as a drop-in replacement for the Google Now assistant on Android devices; that means users can select launching Cortana as their default on-board assistant, and launch it by holding down the device's home key. However, notes the article, "The update version still doesn't include 'Hey Cortana' support, largely because of hardware limitations that prevent Cortana from always listening for the command."

4 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Yay! by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Informative

    Now I can have a voice assistant that works even less than Google now does!

    Microsoft innovating the future by copying the past. (TM)

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    1. Re:Yay! by cheater512 · · Score: 5, Informative

      http://searchengineland.com/go...

      They got caught red handed.

    2. Re:Yay! by sexconker · · Score: 5, Informative

      Wrong. They got "caught" doing the same thing every other search engine does with toolbars (or now, what Google does with Chrome). They were simply monitoring what a user clicks on and adding a +1 to that site's weight in their crazy algorithm.
      They weren't copying Google's results, they were copying users's clicks, just like everyone else. If a user clicked on a Google search result, the referrer and the page were fed to Bing, just like with any other user navigation.

      Google ran a smear campaign and clicked on extremely specific results thousands of times from many IPs in their offices n order to poison the result set and show Bing was copying Google. They only had a handful of successes in altering Bing's search results, but the "BING COPIES GOOGLE" campaign was very successful, because people believe it to this day despite the fact that it was debunked several times.

      I hate both companies, but let's at least be correct when talk about them being shitty.

    3. Re:Yay! by teh+dave · · Score: 3, Informative

      That is dishonest because it is not the complete story.

      From the same article you linked, is a link to this one which reveals that it barely factors into most search result rankings. Furthermore, whilst Bing gets some information on result rankings from Google, they get that info from any search certain IE users make anywhere on the web, not just Google.