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Cortana Can Now Replace Google Now On Android Devices
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."
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!
It sure is nice for you that you can make billions of dollars by exploiting a Linux kernel made for free by volunteers and rebrand it Android, but where's my Bash shell, Google? Why do you have to use Free Software to deny me my Freedom, Google? Hey!! FUCK YOU, Google.
Being someone who's riding the talk to your phone/watch bus, its so much faster than typing for many things.
Until you try to demo it to someone, that's when schroedingers cat mode activates.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I like it for when I'm cooking - "okay Google, set a timer for fifteen minutes" or "what's 500 milliliters in cups?" Don't have to get the phone dirty with whatever meat juices I've got on my hands.
i use it when im driving, or when i see something and i just want a quick answer like "hey google when did so and so end"
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Honestly, I'm kinda happy that third party software can't continuously listen to my microphone.
a non-american accent you insensitive clod
This sentence also still applies if you replace the word cooking with masturbating.
exploiting a Linux kernel made for free by volunteers
Corporations like Red Hat, Suse, IBM, Texas Instruments, Linaro, Samsung, Oracle, and yep, even Microsoft, all contributed to Linux. In fact, corporate contributions now stand at about 80% of all submissions, according to the Linux Development Report. The notion that Linux is made exclusively by a bunch of unpaid volunteers is simply not true. It started out that way, but it has a lot of corporate support these days.
In case you're wondering, Google was the 8th most prolific Linux kernel corporate contributor in 2014.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Meanwhile Cortana is not available in Canada because Microsoft would have to provide French support as well as English in order to be legal here.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Truth, people walking around talking into the air is the new normal.
Whose Android device has a "home key"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I would like it if we could use both.
I like it when I discover my neighbor is trying to control my thoughts through my cutlery and I need to do search of ways of dissolving body parts while I'm mixing chloroform.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I guess Android has the needed hooks to make this happen. That's good. I think that Microsoft would allow Cortana to be replaced as a default on Windows 10 Mobile, if anybody would care enough for it to happen (I doubt it).
Windows 10? Probably not, but again, if people really wanted it, they'd probably do it, but again, I doubt there'd be a call for it. You can use Google Now via Chrome, and Google has shown little interest in native apps for any platform versus Chrome add ins, and think that's probably all any Google Now user would really want anyway.
Of course, Apple has no interest or motivation to bring Siri outside of the iOS/OS X ecosystem.
Oddly, I wouldn't be surprised if Cortana ends up being the most flexible service in terms of third party support and applications, because in a real sense, it has to be.
For some of my searches, Duck has credited Yandex in the results. Or is Yandex also peeking at Google?
I want Google Now on Windows! Cortana is okay, but Google Now integrates with my email and my calendar and everything JUST WORKS.
I want google now on my iphone. I wish I could get my iphone to use google and google maps as the default. Even my kids realize how bad siri is. When I ask siri for something even if it's just for directions, they usually say "ask google, don't ask siri, siri is stupid"
This is awesome. I'm not a microsoft fan but regardless... having options and choices and being able to evaluate the competition is GREAT.
Google Now. I love it.
Cortana. Maybe it will be as good. Maybe it will be better. Maybe whatever it does better Google will add. Maybe what it does worse both will subtract. In the end, guess whom that helps - ME and YOU and everyone using Android. Which, of course, is the only mobile platform to use, right?
E
"People have been talking into phones and speakers long before the internet. "
True, but they didn't walk around in public apparently talking to themselves until the advent of the cellular phone.
Now, it is not uncommon to hear something that appears to be a conversation between two people that turns out to be two people talking on their phones and oblivious that they sound like they're talking to each other, especially at the grocers where they both may be talking about milk, eggs or some other foodstuff they are standing near.
So yeah, the borderline crazies no longer talk to themselves, it's become pointless for getting attention. The real crazies never did talk out loud, the voices in their heads were far too paranoid about getting caught!
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
or "what's 500 milliliters in cups?"
That would be 1x 500millilitre cup, or 500x 1milliliter cups, or 35,7x 14mililitre cups ...
Cortana Can Now Replace Google Now
This is why title case for headlines is stupid.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The hardware assist is a very small amount of signal processing to identify sibilants and plosives (something that a 2MHz 6502 could do in real time) and flag things that have the same pattern as a certain phrase ('Okay Google', I think - not used it) to wake up another core. I think in the Moto X, they use a small ARM core for it, though they may have a two-phase process where a hardware implementation wakes up a small ARM core that does a better job and wakes up the application cores if there's something interesting. In either case, it's probably quite difficult to change the pattern of sibilants and plosives that it looks for whatever Cortana wants, either because it's hard wired or because there's no software API for changing it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Will Microsoft be suing the Microsoft Cortana division for violating Microsofts' innovation ?
Me: Set a timer for 30 minutes
Cortana: Let me search the web for you...
Me: How far is New York City from here?
Cortana: I can't tell if you can get there by car
Microsoft has a lot of work to do before they can play with the big boys.
They wouldn't have been hired if the company didn't have an agenda, even if that agenda is as simple as "make sure this guy doesn't have to worry about his day job so he can keep focusing on this work which is critical to us".
Regardless, they are not unpaid volunteers as the ancestor post asserted.
I hate to say this but, Siri is probably smarter than your kids are.
My 64 year old father uses Siri and has no issues. At first it had a problem understanding him, but now she responds with useful results.
Yes, siri has more knowledge than my kids and yes, it can give correct responses but I find that it's success rate is closer to 60% while google's is closer to 90%. Simple requests like "what time does store X close" many times it responds back that it doesn't know while somehow google does know. Same with navigation requests, it many times can't find the location while google has no problem understanding my request. So, yes, siri does give answers but once you get used to google's much better answers it is a poor substitute. Even google's voice recognition seems to be better where siri seems to get the words wrong more often than google on the same phone.