"Bing provides the "intelligence engine" or "intelligence fabric" at the center of Cortana. In turn Cortana is a stack of technology and capabilities, including speech recognition, natural language understanding and an index of information from which to provide answers."

http://searchengineland.com/cortana-expands-boundaries-search-will-eventually-eat-213564?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed-main

I know I sound like a broken record sometimes, but once again... the children of someone born today will study things called "keywords" in history class and the idea that people typed these keywords things into a search engine to find answers will seem as strange to them as the idea that you had to get daily deliveries of ice to keep your food cold and ice harvesting was once a big business.

So MS got a bollocking for packaging IE onto Windows, and now they're going to interweave their new augmented reality into the mutli-billion dollar search industry.

It seems like a great avenue for them to eat up search share.

Anyone used Cortana?  The ads make it look like Google Now functionality  + Siri's chuminess + a whole new layer of smug.
If it were a person I'd punch it.

>So MS got a bollocking for packaging IE onto Windows, and now they're going to interweave their new augmented reality into the mutli-billion dollar search industry.
>It seems like a great avenue for them to eat up search share.


It seems like the MS hating has gone with new behemoths (Google and Apple mostly) taking on the pain of competition investigations etc.

Ironically, If MS do this and it gets some traction, it actually seems more likely there will be less breakup calls on Google.

I've never been fond of talking TO my phone or TV appliance.

Do many people?

I think the market is going against the few of us here who think it's weird. Truth be told, I use Google voice search a fair bit, both in the browser and on my phone. Talking to devices is becoming standard via Siri, Google Now, Amazon's fire devices etc...

As ergophobe said above, and I agree with, future generations will look at us weirdly thinking we did things with keyboards etc

Quote from: Drastic on January 27, 2015, 02:46:55 PM
I've never been fond of talking TO my phone or TV appliance.

Do many people?

Only if I was sitting in the command chair of the USS Enterprise. 

However, if I spent a lot of time in a car I think I would use it a fair bit.

If Cortana really is a cross between Goog Now and Siri that sounds good to me. I like that Now anticipates my info needs without yacking away. Still like most things Goog, Now is a little bit creepy. Still there are times you want your secretary to be cracking wise like Siri.

Quote from: JasonD on January 27, 2015, 02:15:12 PM
It seems like the MS hating has gone with new behemoths (Google and Apple mostly) taking on the pain of competition investigations etc.

Yes, MS is seen as the company that better get its shit together before it's eaten, not the juggernaut that can set markets and destroy competitors. So I think many people and most regulators, fear Google way more than MS at this point. I suspect almost everyone here falls into that category.

>Do many people?

Judging from my kids, girls under 15 seem to love it.

update:

You can't turn off Cortana in the (mandatory for home users) Windows 10 Anniversary Update

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3100358/windows/you-cant-turn-off-cortana-in-the-windows-10-anniversary-update.html

Since I've had this thing turned off for months now, I don't even remember what it actually does outside of voice commands.

In my flurry of Win10 installs in VMs the first thing I've been doing is turning off Cortana. No thanks. Yes I'm sure. No, really, I'm positive I don't want this.

If they force it onto me at least it will only be in VMs. All that telemetry is going directly into Bing. It listens to your microphone if you have it on, so they're going to bug ever install on Win10? Fortunately I can remove the microphone from VM access, and my cameras have tape on them. Given the negative comments I've seen about this I would bet that MS will walk back this decision.

Logging out of Cortana in the Anniversary Update


Click Cortana
Choose Notebook
Choose About me
Select User Account
Select Sign Out
Cortana will now revert to a generic search engine for your PC and web with no links to your Microsoft Account.

http://www.windowscentral.com/you-can-disable-cortana-windows-10

Good to know. I think I have thwarted MS in my installs as I have not connected any to a hotmail account or other MS account.