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back to article Revamped Cortana finally lands on UK mobe mass market

Microsoft’s ravenous, data hungry ‘personal assistant’ Cortana has arrived on iOS and Android in the UK, and the app has been revamped. Cortana has been available here since July 2014 on Windows Phones, and last year on Windows 10. But “she” finally arrives on devices people actually use. The UI overhaul is to address the …

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  1. djstardust

    Ha bloody ha

    Just about every Windows 7, 8 & 10 user is downloading tools to STOP slurp by adding hosts exceptions and firewall rules.

    What makes MS think anyone would want to put a slurping assistant voluntarily on a non-MS device?

    Are they for real?

    14 2 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ha bloody ha

      Are they for real?

      Most certainly are. In Redmond nobody can hear the customers' screams.

      However, it should be amusing to see how few voluntary installs they get.

      8 1 Reply
      1. a_yank_lurker
        Reply Icon

        Re: Ha bloody ha

        I will not install knowing any spyware for anyone including Slurp on my phones. They have enough already installed from the carrier and OEM I do not need more.

        1 1 Reply
      2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Ha bloody ha

        However, it should be amusing to see how few voluntary installs they get.

        They'll probably do some deals with carriers to get it lumped onto the handsets and unremovable. Rooting was invented for a reason..

        0 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ha bloody ha

      Just about every Windows 7, 8 & 10 user is downloading tools to STOP slurp by adding hosts exceptions and firewall rules.

      Really? You must lead a VERY isolated life.

      4 16 Reply
      1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Ha bloody ha

        The few Windows users I know have put in place a lot of measures just to stop the slurping of data and worse, the W10 Adverts. Ok, one of them has a really shit hot Windows Admin for a son and he put it all in place.

        Many others have dropped windows totally. As they are photographers, the 27in iMac is hard to resist.

        The 5k screen is magnificent.

        4 2 Reply
    3. Pat 11
      Reply Icon

      Re: Ha bloody ha

      Any recommendations?

      0 0 Reply
      1. djstardust
        Reply Icon

        Re: Ha bloody ha

        DWS lite or Spybot Anti-Beacon

        1 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Usability threshold

    Cortana will have reached what I consider to be a satisfactory usability threshold when it correctly responds to the command "Cortana, uninstall yourself."

    14 0 Reply
    1. Chris King
      Reply Icon

      Re: Usability threshold

      She can't even find my nearest pub, and it's only 50 yards away from where I'm sitting right now !

      Maybe she'll sulk when she finds she finds out there are Other Apps on Android and iOS.

      3 0 Reply
    2. joed
      Reply Icon

      Re: Usability threshold

      Does anyone know her reaction to "Cortana go f.. yourself"? For obvious reason's she's brain dead on any of my personal systems (and I'm not going to conduct this test on a corporate machine).

      0 0 Reply
      1. Repnescasb
        Reply Icon

        Re: Usability threshold

        I told her to bog off, unfortunately she just told me what it meant rather than doing it.

        She didn't seem to impressed when I told her to boil her head either.

        Plain refused to calculate PI to a billion places, where's prof Forbin when you need him.

        0 0 Reply
  3. Terry 6 Silver badge

    Waste of space

    I could perhaps forgive Cortana doing what Google does best, phoning home, if it had some claim to actually being useful. But Cortana's search results have never got me closer to an answer I might search for than Bing - which is to say completely useless.

    1 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Waste of space

      I never thought it would have improved to that extent

      0 0 Reply
  4. Ted's Toy

    Another try

    Is this another try at Windows on ARM Rt|T didn't work so how much battery power will be used? Even Intel could not get RT to work on any of their low powered cpu's so how do they expect a Windows product to work on an ARM powered device?

    0 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good if it was useful

    Cortana's speech recognition is generally excellent, but the lack of a voice activated wakeup (on winphone) greatly reduces it's usefulness in cars for example - not much point having hands-free speech-operated actions if you crash whilst groping for the little magnifying glass icon to turn it on. And although it is very good at inderstanding what you want to do, the range of commands it can actually execute is very poor which again greatly reduces the point of having it. As someone pointed out search results are woeful too, and although that's not really a Cortana issue, again it reduces the overall usefulness.

    0 0 Reply
  6. Barry Rueger

    OK Google

    Someone explain how this differs from Google's version?

    I do occasionally use Google's voice recognition, for email or text, and have actually been pretty impressed how well it does the job.

    0 0 Reply

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