I ask Siri to make phones calls and set a timer. I know these companies wanted us to use voice assistants more often but for me it was always faster to pick up my phone and do it myself. This reminds me of last year when articles were circulating about Amazons Alexa costing the company $3bn in the first quarter of 2022.
Cortana was pretty good at understanding me. Was much faster to use my voice than touch, for stuff like setting reminders and alarms. Or starting music (it understandably sucked at changing tracks, unless you had headphones).
I was excited for what else they would make it do. But it became clear MS only goal with it was to advertise stuff. And to US only. And when they failed that, they ripped out any useful features from it.
Yeah I tell Google Assistant “Wake me at 8:30AM” or “navigate to 123 Fake St” and it does a good job. I can also tell it “send email to myself” since I made an address book nickname in my own entry called “myself.” Otherwise it never worked.
I mostly use Siri to send my wife texts while I’m driving. And it fucks up half the time.
Sad, with the emergence of GPT they should’ve find a way to combine it with GPT to actually have a smart assistant.
Depends what you mean by “smart assistant”. Spew a bunch of trivia on a random subject? Sure. Understand your speech commands better? Maybe. Actually manage your stuff (meetings, reminders)? Nope.
ChatGPT is good at making up pieces of text that come very very close to what you wanted (more so in the spirit rather than the letter of it), but it’s not very good at anything else.
ChatGPT has potential to create meeting invitations. I asked it:
Today is 2023-08-07. I’m in Tokyo. Draft a calendar invitation for coffee meeting at Starbucks in Shibuya during lunch time on Wednesday. Answer in ics format.
It answered:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//ChatGPT//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Coffee Meeting at Starbucks Shibuya LOCATION:Starbucks Shibuya, Tokyo DTSTART:20230809T120000 DTEND:20230809T130000 DESCRIPTION:Let's meet up for a coffee and chat at Starbucks in Shibuya during lunchtime. END:VEVENT END:VCALENDARRequires a bit of prompt engineering to make it work, but this can probably be improved with some fine tuning. All you need is something that detects and parses ics invitation in the output.
Sure it can output .ics but the question is, would you trust it to manage your calendar? To get every single meeting right?
Software at its core is a precision tool. When it goes wrong it was either made wrong or you used it wrong. But ML introduces another layer for which the software maker doesn’t want to take responsability, and you the user have no idea if you’re using it right. When it fails there’s “nobody to blame” yet you’re the one left holding the bag.
With fundamentally flawed software like this (ambiguous by design) it’s fun to play (especially if it seems to make sense 80-90% of the time), but it really sucks to have to depend on it for actually important stuff.
Depends what you mean by “smart assistant”. Spew a bunch of trivia on a random subject? Sure. Understand your speech commands better? Maybe. Actually manage your stuff (meetings, reminders)? Nope.
Give you a big juicy fart? Definitely
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Ms already pushing copilot in office and windows. I think, using an old branding with questionable reputation (Cortana) would be a bad move for them.
They simply start from scratch using all “new MS” branding and wording.
Hahaha no. No one wants that. But it’s coming I’m sure
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lol that thumbnail
Tell me a joke.
Okay. Also, I’m dying!Good, I never used the thing any way. I didn’t mind the feature existing, I just wish they wouldn’t keep trying to ram it down our throats. Now they’re trying the same with Bing AI, another neat thing I’ll likely never use.
As a Halo fan, it’s heartbreaking to see how Microsoft wanted to embrace the Halo universe and its obvious there was genuine passion to do this in the lead-up to Halo Infinite, and here we are now with Halo on life support and Cortana completely forgotten about.
I literally forgot this existed 💀💀
I was excited when voice assistants first came out. Siri, cortana, google assistant. More than 10 years later and the technology just completely sucks. Even the simplest thing of trying to set a quick reminder on my phone is just quicker by doing it manually.
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Well tbh, Cortana was really behind Google Assistant and Siri and have mostly not been updated in a couple of years.
Glad to see it’s being finally deprecated.
Cortana was so far ahead of the competition when it launched on Windows Phone and really useful. But they messed it up with Windows 10 Mobile and even more so on desktop Windows.
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I use debian btw
