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Microsoft's Satya Nadella Shown Up By Confused Cortana Assistant

Posted by samzenpus on from the try-again-later dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was a little embarrassed at a Salesforce conference today when he tested the company's personal virtual assistant during a presentation. Slightly fluffing the question 'Show me my most at-risk opportunities', Nadella was dismayed to find Cortana offering him a Bing page with the search term 'Show me to buy milk at this opportunity'. Two further efforts to discover the exposure of his shares failed to achieve their aim, and eventually the CEO of Microsoft gave up. The fact that he stumbled over his first attempt at the question seemed to floor Cortana, which uses the 'Einstein' AI engine, and which has been more praised for its accurate speech recognition than its ability to understand what an array of interpreted words actually mean.

5 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. What did the question even mean? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, "show me my most at-risk opportunities"? Show me your what now? I'm pretty sure I'm human, and I'm pretty sure I speak English and have a fair knowledge of "stuff", but I honestly have no idea what this sentence means. Opportunities that are at risk? Does that mean a chance to win a free lunch that is ending soon?

    If someone said "show me my most at-risk opportunities" too me I would probably consider that I'd misheard and look for near-fit sentences that made sense too. At the very least I'd ask them to repeat themselves to confirm that they were, in fact, speaking gibberish.

    1. Re:What did the question even mean? by tomhath · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's definitely salesman jargon ("What potential customers are most likely to not complete the sale"). That's a big problem for any speech recognition, words have different meaning in different context.

    2. Re:What did the question even mean? by Nyder · · Score: 3, Insightful

      all you are showing is a lack of knowledge of business. anyone that works in sales or business would have no issues understanding the sentence.

      And this is why it failed. Cortana isn't working in sales or business.

      I just wonder why the fuck the person didn't actually try asking his question some time before the conference to test it out? This is like compiling some code, give a person the *.exe when you never bothered to run it yourself to see if it works. Sure, you think it should work great, but it probably won't. You have to test it first. Or even worse, Nadella is a CEO who actually believes the hype wagon his company spews, and doesn't bother to actually use the products his company makes.

      Idiot got what he deserved.

      --
      Be seeing you...
  2. Re:Cant see why this is a problem. by Darinbob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All business related questions from executives tend to be nonsense or gibberish.

  3. Not cortana's fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Only a fool would try to do a public demonstration of something he hasn't tried successfully multiple times before.