Cortana Not Going Away Whether You Like it or Not

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Microsoft has announced that it has purchased Semantic Machines, a company that is "advancing the state of conversational AI." This will put Cortana into the position of being the most advanced OS AI that will never be used by most of its owners. Thanks cageymaru.

We are excited to announce today that we have acquired Semantic Machines Inc., a Berkeley, California-based company that has developed a revolutionary new approach to building conversational AI. Their work uses the power of machine learning to enable users to discover, access and interact with information and services in a much more natural way, and with significantly less effort.

We are further developing our work in conversational AI with our digital assistant Cortana, as well as with social chatbots like XiaoIce. XiaoIce has had more than 30 billion conversations, averaging up to 30 minutes each, with 200 million users across platforms in China, Japan, the United States, India and Indonesia. With XiaoIce and Cortana, we’ve made breakthroughs in speech recognition and more recently become the first to add full-duplex voice sense to a conversational AI system, allowing people to carry on a conversation naturally.
 
Great, now Clippy will never shut up, and will comprehend my weird pr0n fetishes :|

jackass_clippy.jpg
 
Thankfully the regedit to disable Cortana still works as of the Spring Update...
Easy peasy.

  1. Click Start, type gpedit.msc and hit enter.
  2. Navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search.
  3. Locate Allow Cortana and double-click on it to open the relevant policy.
  4. Select Disabled.
  5. Click Apply and OK to turn off Cortana.
 
I use Cortana every single day. Between my Xbox One X and the tie in between my phone and computer, it is really useful. I prefer to type a text through my keyboard on my computer, it is far more convenient than typing on the phone.
 
@ Microsoft -
Windows 10 will never be installed on my computer , whether you like it or not

I'm ok with win 10.

That said.....

I have found in the past my resistance to updating to [X] always collapses when game/app/thing/ [Y] I really want requires it.

I really liked my 8800 GTX - till it could not keep up. My GTX 580 was amazing with AA -very little performance drop even at high settings- till it could not keep up.

Makes me wonder what must have/use api/thing will be in Win 10 eventually that a dev will want to not use.
 
Honestly Win 10 works great..with cortana and all the other stupid bullshit disabled, on a laptop that isn't connected to anything important that is used by kids to watch youtube and play roblox. I sure as hell wouldn't install it on my primary rig though. I ran it on there until they decided to downgrade Win 10 Pro to basically home edition only you paid more because they removed the "pro" features.
 
I'm ok with win 10.

That said.....

I have found in the past my resistance to updating to [X] always collapses when game/app/thing/ [Y] I really want requires it.

I really liked my 8800 GTX - till it could not keep up. My GTX 580 was amazing with AA -very little performance drop even at high settings- till it could not keep up.

Makes me wonder what must have/use api/thing will be in Win 10 eventually that a dev will want to not use.
Nobody wants to use DirectX 12, so it's already here.
 
Honestly Win 10 works great..with cortana and all the other stupid bullshit disabled, on a laptop that isn't connected to anything important that is used by kids to watch youtube and play roblox. I sure as hell wouldn't install it on my primary rig though. I ran it on there until they decided to downgrade Win 10 Pro to basically home edition only you paid more because they removed the "pro" features.

Been running the latest production builds since I built this sig rig almost two years ago. 4 feature updates, went from 2 1080s to 2 1080 Tis, swapped out the 3 1080p 3D monitors with a better set of 1080p 3D monitors, added two VR headsets, a 4k monitor and an additional 4 TB of app storage. I've never plugged this amount of hardware into a PC with this amount of software installed running prior versions of Windows but I don't see how Windows 7 or 8.1 would handle this setup any better, especially when dealing with 4k.
 
I use classic shell, disable Cortana, updates (I update the OS every Friday) and prevent tracking (with a PI-HOLE) but the gyrations you go through to run the OS the way you want have relegated Windows 10 to being just a game machine for me. I dual boot and use Linux for my real computing/programming needs and just use Windows 10 for games.
 
RIP, Semantic Machines. When you sell out to MS, it's the kiss of death and the founders usually jump ship at the first opportunity.
 
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Its weird to me that people are totally cool with open mics they dont control....

Like the ones on smartphones ~99% of people carry around with them ~99% of the time? Or am I just being paranoid, now?

But in all seriousness, I've been using Cortana on my PC and phone for over a year; in that time it's evolved from a novelty to a pretty awesome tool I'd definitely rather not make do without. If it keeps evolving at this pace, I could see it actually fulfilling the role of a personal assistant within a couple years. And beyond that, who knows? The Skynet's the limit!
 
If you are using Windows Home you must first download and install group policy editor. Then you can proceed with modifying the policy on the device as needed.

So instead of just having an option to disable Cortana, MS forces you to go out of your way with a number of extra steps. MS did a great job of adding a lot of extra steps to do the simplest tasks in Win10.
Cause they don't want people to disable shit. Sure it won't stop the people know their shit but majority of people won't be able to do it.
 
Like the ones on smartphones ~99% of people carry around with them ~99% of the time? Or am I just being paranoid, now?

But in all seriousness, I've been using Cortana on my PC and phone for over a year; in that time it's evolved from a novelty to a pretty awesome tool I'd definitely rather not make do without. If it keeps evolving at this pace, I could see it actually fulfilling the role of a personal assistant within a couple years. And beyond that, who knows? The Skynet's the limit!

I know there's a lot of aversion to this type of tech around here but the overall market is big into it. If you're a major tech company like Microsoft there's no choice but to develop this stuff. I get making it easier to disable but no one is selling this stuff based on how easy to disable it is.

This is just one of those situations where certain techies have their opinion and the market has a much different one.
 
I know there's a lot of aversion to this type of tech around here but the overall market is big into it. If you're a major tech company like Microsoft there's no choice but to develop this stuff.
Wrong. There is absolutely no need for Microsoft to develop this -- at least not as part of Windows. Cortana is just another part of all the unnecessary crap crammed into Windows 10.

99.9% of Microsoft's Windows revenue comes from selling Windows to OEMs who install it on the computers they sell. As a result, Microsoft is guaranteed to sell a couple hundred million copies of Windows every year. When people buy a new computer, 99% of them don't care what version of Windows it comes with. And they certainly don't care whether or not it includes Cortana, or Candy Crush, or only of the other bloatware. Hell, if Microsoft started selling Windows XP again, it would probably outsell all the other versions.
 
Wrong. There is absolutely no need for Microsoft to develop this -- at least not as part of Windows. Cortana is just another part of all the unnecessary crap crammed into Windows 10.

99.9% of Microsoft's Windows revenue comes from selling Windows to OEMs who install it on the computers they sell. As a result, Microsoft is guaranteed to sell a couple hundred million copies of Windows every year. When people buy a new computer, 99% of them don't care what version of Windows it comes with. And they certainly don't care whether or not it includes Cortana, or Candy Crush, or only of the other bloatware. Hell, if Microsoft started selling Windows XP again, it would probably outsell all the other versions.

Oh good, a business professional and educator all in one. :D Why don't we all just go back too Windows 95 and live with that forever, instead. :) Cortona is not bloat and all those other things you mentioned are not installed, they simply are pointers to those items if you want to install them. You are right about one thing though, a lot of people do not care and do not even notice they are there.
 
Like the ones on smartphones ~99% of people carry around with them ~99% of the time? Or am I just being paranoid, now?

But in all seriousness, I've been using Cortana on my PC and phone for over a year; in that time it's evolved from a novelty to a pretty awesome tool I'd definitely rather not make do without. If it keeps evolving at this pace, I could see it actually fulfilling the role of a personal assistant within a couple years. And beyond that, who knows? The Skynet's the limit!

My preference is for Siri, but she is also quiet 99% of the time, unless I call for her.
 
Wrong. There is absolutely no need for Microsoft to develop this -- at least not as part of Windows.

OEMs are now starting to add Alexa to their consumer PCs: https://www.onmsft.com/news/acer-is...-with-the-spin-3-and-spin-5-laptops-this-week. And Alexa is supposed to get rolled into Cortana and vice versa at some point. I don't see how Microsoft ignores this market even with desktop Windows. Especially with desktop Windows if it is to have any connection to consumers.
 
Well I haven't seen any sign of it since I swiftly eradicated it after I installed windows, so I'm pretty sure it is gone.
 
What happened to all the Trekkies?

Who doesn't want to have full voice control/ui?

Yes. It still sucks from a SciFi perspective. Getting better.

I'd love to be able to verbally cast in Skyrim for example.
 
No Cortana in Windows 10 LTSB, thankfully.

And no updates outside of that Servicing Branch, either. If you need something from 1709 but you are on 1607, you are screwed, you cannot update to major feature updates.
 
And no updates outside of that Servicing Branch, either. If you need something from 1709 but you are on 1607, you are screwed, you cannot update to major feature updates.

Who needs feature updates? Even Windows 7 is still good as anything today. Certainly Windows 10 from 2016 is more than enough for the next 5+ years.

And I've always disabled Windows Update on my Windows 10 installations specifically to not get feature updates, as they always break things. A Windows 10 OS' expiration date is whenever a person is next going to install a large update (at which time it's better to do a full clean installation). So, the fact that LTSB has no feature updates is a MAJOR upside to having LTSB. People just don't need or want that crap, and it's only been meaningless bloat that's been added to Windows 10 with each bi-annual major update.

Microsoft tries to discourage people from using LTSB because Microsoft knows it's exactly what people want, and Microsoft wants any excuse to push out another bad patch that resets people's telemetry, default app, and other settings to the MS-preferred (because it gives them more data) configuration.
 
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