• backgroundcow@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Cortana is/was by far the best name of the digital assistants - probably because it was created by sci-fi story writers rather than a marketing department. They should just have upgraded her with the latest AI tech and trained her to show the same kind of sassy personality as in the games and it would have been perfect.

    Who in their right mind thinks “Bing copilot” is a better name? It makes me picture something like the blow-up autopilot from Airplane!

    • sic_1@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Cortana was a great name also because in Halo she turned evil, which is fitting for an MS product. Bing copilot gives me strong Clippy vibes.

      • addie@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Bungie Studios had a habit of naming their AIs after mythological French swords; Durandal in Marathon, and Cortana in Halo. Microsoft ought to name their new AI assistant Hauteclaire or Joyeuse or something else that follows the theme, but I very much suspect that it’s going to be named by a committee of marketing execs. Much more likely to find scholars and poets developing software than in the C-suite.

    • stigmata@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I agree. At first I thought the goal was to get rid of an assistant in general, but just renaming it to something worse is confusing.

    • PurpleTentacle@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      I generally agree with you, and Microsoft has always been notoriously awful at naming just about anything. The still are.

      But Cortana’s reputation has been ruined to the point where there’s no coming back from it. It was a good name, but a lousy product. From a marketing perspective, it’s far, far, easier to start from scratch with a better product than to try to repair the reputation of the old one.

    • salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
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      1 year ago

      A “sassy personality” just puts the assistant into the uncanny valley for me. I prefer it to just do its job and not try to fool me into anthropomorphizing it.

      But the name was pretty cool, though, as noted by another commenter, not the easiest to pronounce.

    • kelvie@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I don’t know why but out of all of the alternatives I found Alexa by far the easiest to say (sorry to all the people named Alexa out there). Okay google, hey Siri, Bixby, Cortana are just hard to pronounce.

      • addie@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        You a non-native English speaker? I’d have thought the letter X would have made Alexa and Bixby hardest to pronounce for most people, and Siri and Cortana the easiest. Spanish stress pattern for ‘Cortana’ doesn’t match English, making it harder to say it in a way that it recognises. But that’s obviously just me - I’m Scottish, and none of these things have ever recognised a single word I say.

        One of the most-requested features on these smart assistants would be the ability to rename / nickname them, but that’s an expensive ask. They all offload their actual voice processing to a cloud server somewhere, and then have their ‘activation sounds’ hard-coded into them. Needs to be either a few syllables in a row (hay-see-ree) or some unusual sequence (bicks-bee) to not have hundreds of false positives. Giving them nicknames would require them to send their voice samples to their back-end servers basically 24/7, which would cost them a fortune to run. And also be a privacy nightmare, but I’m sure the operators would be just fine with that if they could afford it.

        • toynbee@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I haven’t used Alexa in a long time, but back when I did there was a list of wake words from which you could choose.

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Dig a shallow grave next to Windows Phone, Zune, and IE. C’mon guys, you need to catch up to the size of Google’s graveyard.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    A new update is rolling out for Cortana that simply disables the digital assistant three years after Microsoft also discontinued its Cortana apps for iOS and Android.

    If you attempt to launch Cortana on Windows 11 you’ll now be met with a notice about how the app is deprecated and a link to a support article on the change.

    It was deeply integrated into the Windows 10 taskbar, with support for voice commands, reminders, and the ability to open applications.

    Microsoft then dropped Cortana from the Windows 11 taskbar and first boot experience, but kept the standalone app until this week.

    Ultimately, Cortana struggled to compete with rivals like Alexa or Google Assistant, despite a large redesign for iOS and Android.

    The fate of Cortana was largely linked to Microsoft’s failures with Windows Phone, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted in 2019 that Cortana had fallen behind competitors.


    I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • doctor_han@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Microsoft’s “Edge” was Project Spartan at one point wasn’t it? Probably would have confused a lot of people if it came out that way but would’ve been pretty cool.

    • VanillaGorilla@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      That’s not true! In the 90s the Sidewinder input devices were sometimes really good! The strategic commander never happened, and I definitely didn’t buy it, stop asking!

      But the FF joysticks and the gamepad were really good.

      • mihnt@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        They made the best wireless mouse I’ve ever owned under that naming moniker. The SideWinder X8. Big and heavy, which I love. Magnetic charging cable you could use while still using the mouse.

      • nyakojiru@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        There was already an entire cloud market when azure appeared . They just followed the wave . If you are going to give cloud as an example talk me about Oracle or VMware .

        • VanillaGorilla@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          And they mainly innovate in being strange to configure. I have some issues with AWS, but I had massive pains with Azure.

  • Venicon@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Such a missed opportunity. I loved Windows Phone and Cortana was good enough at the time but now with Bing AI I wonder what Cortana could really have been.

    • emptyother@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      They’ll shut down their Bing AI too, as soon as they fail to make it an advertising platform. Doesn’t matter if customers find it useful, if it cant earn them ad money.