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Cortana is really bad

439 pointsby johndavidbackover 7 years ago

39 comments

CydeWeysover 7 years ago
Every single interaction I&#x27;ve ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It&#x27;s worse than the old-school &quot;simple string match on installed applications and files on disk&quot; in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked.<p>I cannot even begin to count how many times I&#x27;ve tried to search for an application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found, then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet Cortana couldn&#x27;t find it.<p>I <i>never</i> want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want a web search I&#x27;ll do it in Chrome&#x27;s address bar. When I type &quot;notepad&quot; I want it to launch Notepad, not query the web!<p>Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched in this state?
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nerfladover 7 years ago
&gt; <i></i><i>The Product Manager in charge of this feature should be immediately fired.</i><i></i><p>I hate this kind of writing. It undermines the otherwise good point the author has.
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etermover 7 years ago
The whole experience of the start search &#x2F; cortana &#x2F; mix is horrible.<p>It can&#x27;t even fuzzy search. Type &quot;view event&quot; and it brings up &quot;view event logs&quot;, if you type &quot;view events&quot; it instead searches bing, in edge, for &quot;view events&quot;.<p>Edge isn&#x27;t even my default browser. Bing isn&#x27;t my default search engine, and I didn&#x27;t want to browse the web.<p>Any slight deviation from an exact phrase and it goes straight from &quot;here&#x27;s the program you want to run&quot; to popping up it&#x27;s search engine.
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TheGRSover 7 years ago
Alright, I&#x27;m glad this is brought up. I am back on Windows 10 after being on OSX for years. For the most part its fine, but it does a lot of things that I just plain don&#x27;t understand. I have no idea how to configure the little metro page to my liking (like, I know how to remove stuff, but how do I make it useful?). Why does it even exist?<p>I can see Microsoft put <i>a lot</i> of work into making Win10 user friendly, but it seems like their designers don&#x27;t understand their users or something. OSX has some bizarre interactions as well (like Finder, wtf is happening there), but for the most part it just works.<p>I guess I don&#x27;t really know what I want my operating system to <i>do</i> precisely. I want it to be smooth, I want it to open programs quickly, I want it to move files around without hassle, and I want it to be secure while also be easily extensible. Unfortunately there&#x27;s a lot of different interpretations of what those things should be. I can appreciate that making a world class operating system on top of decades of legacy code is difficult, but I also need to say: WTF is half of this shit?<p>Windows doesn&#x27;t even come with a simple key reassignment. I had to download SharpKeys to set Caps Lock as Ctrl. That sort of thing just comes with OSX.
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nevesover 7 years ago
How can I disable Cortana?<p>I&#x27;ve tried and failed. I don&#x27;t know why it is necessary an auxiliar app just to index my executables just to be able to type a few letters and start them quickly.
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wvenableover 7 years ago
I really wish Microsoft wouldn&#x27;t bloat Windows with all these useless features. They&#x27;re still acting like they are building a mobile OS. Windows 10 would be fantastic OS if it wasn&#x27;t for all these misguided attempts to act like iOS and Android.
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sebringjover 7 years ago
This reminds me of those new gadget commercials that show existing issues being super difficult when they really are not. You were probably in a terrible mood when you wrote this which makes it much worse than it is. It could try to parse the tracking id for sure and you probably have never dealt with tracking packages before through an API but they give you not that much info most of the time, just like &quot;arrived at shipping location&quot; or &quot;on route to destination&quot; type messages with some times, totally depends on when the tracking is sent out. This is just a very specific use case that isn&#x27;t so user friendly anyway but sure they could do it better but the package id won&#x27;t get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary.
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cbhlover 7 years ago
One piece that&#x27;s missing from this post is -- what did the email containing the tracking number look like?<p>GMail, for example, only parses out package numbers if the retailer sends schema.org markup for it. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;gmail&#x2F;markup&#x2F;reference&#x2F;parcel-delivery" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;gmail&#x2F;markup&#x2F;reference&#x2F;parcel-...</a>)
Theodoresover 7 years ago
The Google approach is much better. Tracking numbers go out in email to the customer and you can put little xml snippets in there so that gmail can put &#x27;track order&#x27; in the subject with a little button to click. This goes to the URL provided in the email, not to some magical service that magically determines if that tracking number came from UPS, USPS, Royal Mail, China Post, or whatever. Due to how couriers merge and get acquired you don&#x27;t even have consistent tracking numbers for a given courier. So it is much better for the customer to not be guessing this stuff with Cortana.<p>Not everyone uses gmail. But, in the UK, for ecommerce, you can fully expect more than 50% of the order emails to be gmail addresses. Therefore the xml snippets approach is worth doing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;gmail&#x2F;markup&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;gmail&#x2F;markup&#x2F;</a>
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moonman272over 7 years ago
This is just old school Microsoft engineering. Add a feature bullet point to the package, don’t worry about how it’s integrated or if it works. It’s the same with most anything from them you dig in to.
magiceover 7 years ago
As much fun as it is to bash Microsoft and Windows (although, let&#x27;s face it, Windows has been so much better in the last few releases), I personally think Microsoft, its engineers, as well as its PM deserve (some?) empathy rather than anger for this.<p>I mean, I can almost imagine how this thing happens. Someone somewhere sometime said, &quot;hey, wouldn&#x27;t it be cool if xyz?&quot; Someone else replied with &quot;oh yeah, and it&#x27;s not THAT hard!&quot; And the PM is probably like &quot;well, low risk, too, so whatever you wish.&quot;<p>Then, the feature is thrown together, with or without explicit planning. It probably attracts way higher attention than expected, because either it is hooked into mechanism intended for real important stuff or it can be demoed so nicely (imagine: if you are the developer doing demoing, you probably have the damned tracking number ready for copy and paste). It does not support all operations, because no one looks at it twice after some brief &quot;yo, so cool&quot; moment.<p>The annoyance may or may not have a bug associated with it somewhere. But let&#x27;s be realistic. If you are a PM, which one would you choose: &quot;some nobody-care feature is not easy to use&quot; or &quot;if you stand on 1 leg, jump 3 times, press the code of Mordor, Windows seg faults itself&quot;. The 1st one is vague and, let&#x27;s be frank, not that big of a deal. The 2nd one is a big deal: data loss and all manners of unspeakable conditions may break loose. So, any PM would do the 2nd bug first.<p>I mean, seriously, <i>how</i> would you ensure this tiny corner (which a comment below actually says, &quot;I did not realize it exist&quot;) is &quot;easy to use&quot;? No automation tests can catch it. Demoing (again, the developers know how to use it and probably come prepared) won&#x27;t catch it. A&#x2F;B testing probably won&#x27;t even get to it. Its bugs (except if that bugs involving Start menu crashing down) probably have priority between &quot;when I have better work-life balance&quot; and &quot;when the machine is capable of fixing its own issues.&quot;<p>--<p>I will agree that all of these don&#x27;t justify for a shitty experience. Shitty experiences, no matter how small, are shitty. But then, even LaTeX, perfected as it is, annoys me once in a while. Even Emacs, glorious as it is, has &quot;I swear I will switch to Eclipse&quot; moments. And Scheme has about 70 different ways of doing OO programming, none of which really works for my little case.<p>So, maybe a bit more love&#x2F;understanding? It probably helps your (i.e. the users&#x27;) blood pressure anyway.
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camhenlinover 7 years ago
I try to use Cortana to control my Xbox One sometimes. Saying &quot;Hey Cortana, pause&quot; is really handy if you&#x27;re in the middle of watching Netflix, and you get a phone call, or some other life event happens. Or it would be, if Cortana didn&#x27;t take 15-20 seconds to think about it, and only work about 75% of the time, despite having an 8 core processor and a huge array of sensors.
louskenover 7 years ago
Removing cortana was the first thing that I did when I installed windows 10. However even the basic search is incredibly bad. It took months before it even considered searching in Downloads folder (patch fixed it I guess?). And portable apps? Yea, gl with that.<p>But my main problem with searching is when I search for settings and windows apps. That&#x27;s just pure trash. There&#x27;re no aliases so if you don&#x27;t know exactly how MS named the functionality you&#x27;re fucked. And if you know the english word for it, it doesn&#x27;t show up either. And the worst thing: if you KNEW how it used to be called but not the current translation you&#x27;re also fucked. E.g. in english you search for screen saver. In czech it used to be &quot;Spořič obrazovky&quot; but now it&#x27;s &quot;Šetřič obrazovky&quot;. (btw neither of these even show up in the creators update, but in falls they fixed it and &quot;Šetřič obrazovky&quot; will return correct result).<p>Another thing that bothers me with search is diacritics, you have to use it if you want to find anything that has it. And gl with that when using english keyboard layout.<p>It&#x27;s increadibly frustrating to use and I&#x27;ve mostly given up on it and use powershell whenever I can. That doesn&#x27;t fix my problems with diacritics when searching documents though.
rdtscover 7 years ago
Doing anything that approaches human interaction levels is hard. As soon as you make something that responds to language, or looks like a humanoid robot people will automatically expect it to work at the perceived level (i.e. like a human).<p>That means users will get frustrated quickly if it misunderstands or or makes other mistakes. It completely breaks the interaction. To add on top of it, it makes the human feel stupid having to enunciate or repeat the same thing over and over. If they&#x27;d would be typing into a search box for search application, they&#x27;d be fine with it not working because it&#x27;s just a stupid program. As soon as the program is an &quot;AI&quot; or an &quot;assistance&quot; it better be darn good, or it will make users very angry and frustrated.<p>There is also some little part of the human brain that says &quot;oh you think you can act like a human, let&#x27;s how you respond to this&quot;, so they will deliberately mess with it or provide it with confusing input just to see what would happen. (I saw customers do it, they were already frustrated because of a different reason, but used the speech interaction API to really demonstrate how broken the product is). Can&#x27;t blame them, it was broken, but it was a useful less on to learn.
trynumber9over 7 years ago
I&#x27;ve been very disappointed with Cortana. On numerous occasions it has been faster to grab my Macbook out of my backpack. Why is Spotlight able to find a file on my Windows desktop&#x27;s network share that Cortana would not find?<p>And to top it off Spotlight shows me accurate previews of Excel and Word documents. But Cortana, another Microsoft product, does not. Perhaps that&#x27;s a compliment to the team that makes Office for Mac.
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apiover 7 years ago
It&#x27;s got nothing on &quot;Bixby,&quot; Samsung&#x27;s me-too entrant into the world of largely useless voice assistants.
hnnsjover 7 years ago
&quot;People get worked up as hell and I frankly just want to have fun with my devices.&quot;<p>How is this entire post anything but &quot;getting worked up as hell&quot;? Seems to me to be a case of &quot;when other people complain, they&#x27;re whiny, but when _I_ get annoyed, heads must roll!&quot;.
cjsukover 7 years ago
This is most user journeys with MSFT products recently.
Havocover 7 years ago
That entire menu makes me serious question whether anyone at MS actually uses Win 10.<p>No MS I don&#x27;t feeling spending half an hour figuring out what the hell is going on in that UX. That pretty much says it all about how intuitive it is dear designer...
Yhippaover 7 years ago
Interesting that elongated micro-whines have now turned into long-form blog posts.<p>To be honest all of these smart digital assistants have failed me as of late. I used to be able to just text-to-speech searches straight to Google and it did what I wanted to for the most part. Now when I try just any type of reasonable query (I think so at least) Alexa or Google Assistant usually comes back with &quot;Sorry I don&#x27;t know how to do that&quot; which is frustrating.<p>Reminds me of the VR hype. Maybe I should just wait for 10 years and this stuff will finally be usable.
icc97over 7 years ago
The speech recognition of Cortana was pretty excellent - which is what the guys at Microsoft Research care about. The rest just seems to have got messed up in politics.
ChuckMcMover 7 years ago
I have really enjoyed the comments here. I have observed that among my acquaintances Cortana can be either <i>really</i> helpful or <i>really</i> not helpful but I don&#x27;t see a lot of in between sort of &quot;good for this, but not this&quot; sorts of reviews.<p>From the perspective of a dialog system I see it as a bunch of assumptions that are made prior to engaging in the dialog. And given that hypothesis I have looked at people interactions to see how people deal with this sort of &#x27;communication mismatch&#x27; and how they detect it.<p>Certainly there are repeated asks of the same question slightly rephrased as an indicator of a mismatch, but there is also a general resistance to interacting. So with people if someone gets frustrated talking with you and stops, I&#x27;ve seen people use that as a signal to seek out an understanding of where the mismatch is, but in computer dialoging systems that check, and subsequent re-framing is completely missing.<p>The other thing I&#x27;ve observed is that often a dialog system seems to try to be &#x27;human&#x27; in its interaction but because it is a computer the user communicates to it like a &#x27;user&#x27; not like a human. Adding what might be relevant search terms to the utterance as an example. For example, I listened as a person pitched to Siri &quot;I want pizza&quot; and was frustrated at the response (&quot;This is what I&#x27;ve found on the web about Pizza&quot;) And added &quot;I want Dominos Pizza&quot; (additional search term, vendor name). But Siri appeared stuck on being unable to parse an acceptable language target for &#x27;I want&#x27;.<p>Changing that to &quot;Call dominos&quot; or &quot;Where is the nearest Dominos&quot; works well because it as a pre-built in answer action (Telephone call, map directions).<p>All of this the &quot;level 4&quot; version of autonomous conversations where the computer can navigate what it is you are saying and what you expect as a response.
cellisover 7 years ago
Seriously. I refuse to use Cortana on my Xbox One and went back to the native “Xbox” commands. The latency of cortana was atrocious and usually after all that would either reask the question or not do what Xbox would. Microsoft is really good at taking a good thing (Xbox) and making it more bloated and slower.
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nanodanoover 7 years ago
Jeez, this guy gets really angry and swears for pages and pages over a stupid little feature he doens&#x27;t like.
downrightmikeover 7 years ago
Funny how MSFT used Cortana, sure she is a popular character, but she falls very far away from good to deadly to us. She ends up going rampant and turns other AIs against us. Not the most forward thinking, given where they are taking the character.
ndh2over 7 years ago
The sad thing is that the Windows 7 start menu wasn&#x27;t any better. This is not a regression, just some sort of following the tradition.<p>I use an old, discontinued app called Executor that I configure manually. It&#x27;s not a whole lot better in terms of matching, but, because it can be configured, it is much better in terms of getting it to do what I want. It definitely can&#x27;t track your packages, though.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.executor.dk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.executor.dk&#x2F;</a>
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franzpeterfolzover 7 years ago
Well, the Projected Delivery Date is 25th November 2017.<p>How do I know? Took the number and looked it up at ups.<p>I think, I&#x27;m not sure, but I think, if ups delivers on time. Cortana will give you a message, stating the package will arive tomorrow right on 24th of November. Just one day before.<p>Maybe John David Back will give us an update, when his package arrived.<p>BTW delivery times in the US are terrible compared to Germany. Next Day delivery is the state of art. Germany is also much smaller in comparison.
gerdesjover 7 years ago
It will be a while before these digital assistants work properly. None of them work in a way that anyone can possibly call &quot;intelligent&quot;. If I was feeling charitable then I&#x27;d describe them as merely intrusive.<p>When these things do finally get their act together, we will all live in a world that is different from the one we live in now. I hope it is a better one.
drumttocs8over 7 years ago
I just use Everything to search. It&#x27;s great.
2close4comfortover 7 years ago
It is the bing of personal digital assistants...
tehwebguyover 7 years ago
If it’s worse than Siri that is <i>bad</i>.<p>I pulled my hair out one day after telling Siri a half dozen times to “remind me about [an appointment] in two weeks”<p>It kept making an immediate reminder that said “appointment into weeks” - into weeks??? When would someone even say that unless they were saying something like “Days turn into weeks”???
edgarvaldesover 7 years ago
So, anyone know how does it work? I mean, the &quot;tracking a package in Cortana&quot;. I&#x27;m intrigued now.
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harshbutfairover 7 years ago
If I type &quot;lync&quot;, the default option is to run Skype for Business (Lync&#x27;s successor).<p>If I type &quot;skype&quot; the default option is to install Skype for Business, even though I already have it installed.<p>It is very unintuitive. It is as bad as the search in Jira&#x2F;Confluence, and that&#x27;s saying something.
loopdoendover 7 years ago
Why would you paste in a URL when trying to track a package and not just the tracking number?<p>I mean if you have the URL just go to the URL and track your package.<p>I’m pretty sure Cortana was designed as a human interface and not a web browser...
Lewtonover 7 years ago
Have eclipse neon and eclipse oxygen installed<p>Slowly type out eclipse in search bar<p>Watch it randomly switch between the two at each character<p>Randomly as in, sometimes it suggests oxygen on ecl and sometimes it suggests neon on ecl
popekoover 7 years ago
OP: Is that your actual tracking number? If so, I&#x27;d blur it - it may leak your info
modzuover 7 years ago
it&#x27;s the straw that broke the camel&#x27;s back for me and windows as a desktop os. hello again fedora :)
xh3n1over 7 years ago
Really really bad
DoodleBuggyover 7 years ago
And yet Cortana is still better than Siri.
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