Microsoft: We're Not Giving Up On Cortana (Even In Home Automation) (zdnet.com)

Microsoft is trying to fight back against perceptions that Cortana may be its next consumer-centric technology to face the chopping block. Yesterday, the company issued a press release touting recent wins for Cortana. Among these are the officially unveiled Johnson Controls' Cortana-powered thermostat (which goes on sale for $319 starting in March). ZDNet reports the "other recent Cortana device partners": Allwinner: This company has the Tech R16 Quad Core IoT solution (a reference design for device partners).
Synaptics: This ODM (original design manufacturer) and far-field voice processing vendor produces reference designs for consumer IoT, smart speakers, PC, and more that integrate Cortana.
TONLY: Another reference design vendor working with Microsoft on Cortana devices that make use of Skype.
Qualcomm: In addition to partnering with Microsoft on Windows-on-ARM "Always Connected" PCs, Qualcomm is building reference designs on its Smart Audio and Mesh Networking platforms that use Cortana. "In addition to our currently supported home automation partners, we are announcing new partnerships with Ecobee, Geeni, Honeywell Lyric, IFTTT, LIFX, TP-Link Kasa, and Honeywell Total Connect Comfort. Cortana currently supports lights, outlets, switches, and thermostats across all providers," the spokesperson said.

Comments

Re:Cortana?

[beuges]

Exactly. Instead of coming up with all this gimmicky stuff like voice-controlled thermostats, they should rather focus their energy on making the service available to everyone on Windows 10. MS has an infuriating habit of going overboard with features for en-US and treating the rest of the world as an afterthought.

The current availability of Cortana's services is pitiful. It is constantly hyped about new features that have been added (they even got it to speak Klingon), yet for most of the world, it's a glorified interface to Bing.

Years ago, before Win10 was officially released, and when Cortana was first being developed, I read an interview with one of the high-ups in the Cortana project, who said that they were really keen on making it available in an alpha state to as many users as possible, as the key way to train it properly to work in different regions and cultures is to expose it to as much input as possible. That never happened, and the list of supported countries and regions is the same as when I last looked at it over a year ago.

If Cortana's uptake is struggling, it's purely because they limited the user-base themselves to a market that's already invested in Siri, Alexa and Google Now, instead of entrenching its use in the regions where the other players aren't yet fully available. I also believe that's the real reason that Windows Phone failed as well. They did very badly in the US market because iPhones and Android were both already entrenched, but there were a lot of other regions where WP did really well despite the lack of attention from MS. So naturally, instead of solidifying their market position in those regions, they continued ignoring them and focusing on the US where they had already lost the battle, and eventually lost support from the regions which actually had it. Then Joe Belfiore complains that they had no support from developers, ignoring the fact that there's a huge number of developers outside of the US who were hesitant to invest in a platform that MS themselves showed no interest in supporting for their markets.

TL;DR: MS needs to abandon this habit of region-locking features, and then complaining that people aren't supporting or using those features.

How much?

[Major_Disorder]

How much do I NOT want a $319 Cortana powered thermostat? I would tell you, but I can't even think of anything to compare it to. It might actually be the thing I want least in the world.
I just replaced my thermostat a few months ago, it cost me about $50 and allowed me to program in different temperatures at different times of day, and day of the week. It wasn't even the cheapest on available either.
I cant imagine that being able to verbally tell the thermostat to set the temperature one degree higher is going to be worth and additional $269. Especially since my thermostat is in the hall, a good distance from where I usually am.