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Xbox One Summer Update Adds Cortana, Music and More (mashable.com)
The Xbox One is finally getting the anticipated Summer update. The update brings Cortana voice assistant to all Xbox One systems in the United States and UK. "With Cortana, gamers can expect more from voice commands on Xbox," the company wrote in a blog post. In addition, the update is also adding the ability to play background music while you're playing a game. Also, users will be able to set whatever language they want, no matter what country they are in. Mashable reports: Other summer update changes tweak the usability of the console's dashboard and sharing features. There are also a number of invisible changes that prepare the console for the Windows 10 Anniversary update. Launching on Aug. 2, the Anniversary Update carries a number of benefits for gamers, chief among them the launch of Microsoft's Xbox Play Anywhere program. Play Anywhere is Microsoft's version of cross-play, allowing Xbox One users to download and play the PC version of supported games on Windows 10 machines. The list of initially supported games is rather small and it only works if you bought the game digitally, but it's a significant step toward Microsoft's goal of joining the Xbox and Windows platforms under one development umbrella.
I've heard about Play Anywhere a few years ago. It lasted 6 months last time.
So now you'll have a box that analyzes and sends home (for "personalization" and "quality" purposes) everything you say, is always on ("just so you can activate it by voice") and is hooked to your telescreen. Yay!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Because its much more convenient to tell my xbox to record something or invite someone to the party than having to click through a bunch of menus? Do you even xbox?
I'll never be happy until the XBox One lets you install Steam.
I know it won't happen so I plan on a life of unhappiness :(...
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
no i shoebox.. you know go outside into the real world and walk
Sounds like a failure in UI design.
Seems voice controls are only catching on in places where the alternative user interface methods are atrocious, i.e. touchscreens.
What am I missing?
I basically grew up during the 386-486 era of PC computers. Back then, voice recognition was a fairly Big Deal (TM). I remember buying a laptop that came with OS/2 Warp from the IBM store (yes, we had an actual IBM store that sold hardware and software to the public) which came with a copy of VoiceType Dictation on it, and it worked fairly well for navigating the GUI and doing rudimentary dictation. Later my folks bought an Aptiva from the same store that came with SimplySpeaking Gold, which was pretty much VTD for Windows with a different skin.
Throughout the years I've also played around with ViaVoice (on Windows NT) and NaturallySpeaking (Win98). They all worked fine on the hardware from that era (anything from a 33mhz 486 to a 133mhz Pentium). At one point I even owned a high end continuous dictation system built around a stack of four ISA cards (it took up 5 slots since the top card had a huge daughter card attached to it with about a dozen different DSPs) that hooked up to a proprietary microphone through a DB9 connector and dumped text into a DOS based word processor. All of this stuff was 100% offline.
So why is it that all this modern day bullshit requires always online connectivity to give you the same features?
Are you honestly telling me that today's programmers can't figure out how to make this stuff work offline on a handheld or HTPC that literally has 1000x more computational resources than my original IBM 755 Thinkpad?
Or is it just that they don't want to?
That shit belongs on Xbox more than it belongs in Windows.
More crooked shit from an asshole company. ANNIVERSARY update.
You can get your ANNIVERSARY summer UPDATE from the CLOUD.
Fucking liars. All of Microsoft.
Games.
Make games.
The console needs games.
....GO FUCK YOURSELF.
Back on the helpline, that was always fun to walk people through. Whatever happened to Service Packs? Too scary? Too many people not migrating until you had released at least one Service Pack? Sounds like a problem of your own creation, and just changing the names isn't the way to fix it.
While they're at it, why not program it in case the user doesn't have a monitor?
Bad example, as screen readers (such as JAWS, Window-Eyes, and NVDA) do just that. In fact, Windows 10 is still available without charge for licensed users of Windows 7 or 8.1 who use assistive technologies such as text-to-speech.
Because the fucking game console is a PC. It's just a PC frozen in HW specifications and performance (and locked down to ensure performance), so the gaming experience on it is known and consistent. So Cortana is as useful on the gaming console as a PC. Whether it's useful on a PC is a separate issue.
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