Microsoft shuts down Cortana, Apple should do the same with Siri

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 305 points – Microsoft shuts down Cortana, Apple should do the same with Siri
9to5mac.com

Microsoft shuts down Cortana, Apple should do the same with Siri::Cortana is Microsoft’s virtual assistant, which was introduced in 2014 back when Windows Phone was still a thing. Similar to...

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nah

Siri, while not great, handles timers, reminders, and dumbshit like that just fine without typing. I have yet to find another good use for these assistants.

Yep. I’ve used my Google assistant for timers, alarms, weather, and music. Anything more complex is a headache. Even music is half the time.

Asking the thing to handle music in another language was terrible. Asking it to play a French song to an assistent set in English gives stupid results for example. "Que sera, sera" becomes "Oh Sarah".

This! I live in Taiwan, but 99% of my entertainment is from the US. I can’t use Any of these assistants in English otherwise street names or other Mandarin stuff won’t work, but if I use Mandarin assistants none of my music or shows works.

Can you use two? I use both Siri with push to talk from my Watch and Alexa through Echo dot, whichever is convenient. Either one will do times, music, lights, etc

If you took a similar approach, you might use one with each language

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Agreed. I find myself using Siri on walks via AirPods quite a bit. Siri what’s the weather going to be like tonight . Siri what’s in my calendar tomorrow. Siri what’s the latest news. (That opens up podcast app and plays local news I love it. ). Siri let me know when it’s 12:30. I just wish it got better at answering simple questions. A few articles mentioned Apple started looking at incorporating a GPT style AI with Siri.

I can never get Siri to set a timer. Idk why.

I just say "Hey sir, start timer 15 (or whatever) minutes". Works every time. I sometimes even ask how many minutes left.

You can say "Hey Siri, 15 minutes please"

I just trigger Siri manually but that's what I ask every time. It fucks it up all the time. I even did the voice training thing.

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This will make the 3 people who actually used Cortana mildly disgruntled.

I've always hated it as it took a decent amount of my ram without ever having used it

I spent hours trying to get rid of it, only to have it come back a few weeks later after an update.

One of many reasons I abandoned Windows entirely.

Cortana isn't dead. The brand of it is. Bing ai is almost what Cortana was supposed to be

Nah, I use Siri daily for simple tasks. Turning on lights, setting timers, adding things to my groceries list. She’s simple, but perfectly fine for simple tasks.

Please leave her the fuck alone :’)

Do you really want to give Apple access to your house?

For most people, if they want any kind of home automation then they'd have to trust someone, as most people won't be able to deploy and maintain their own system. So now you have 2 options (other than just not automating your home)

  • Trust a company you already have to trust (since they provide the OS and hardware for your computer, phone, tablet, watch, etc.)
  • Trust an additional company

So would you rather bet on 1 company not being evil, or 2 companies not being evil?

You can automate your house yourself without the need for a big corp to step in and get access to your home.

Can I? Sure. Can the average consumer? Hell no.

Then what about not automating your house?

Sure, that’s an option. And we don’t need central heating, a fireplace worked fine. We didn’t even need to build houses, we were fine living in caves. And who needs fire anyway, raw meat and berries are more than enough.

I use Shortcuts to bridge Siri to my Home Assistant setup. Apple doesn’t control my house.

What are they gonna do, turn my lights on? Great prank mr. Tim Apple.

Microsoft isn't giving up on assistants (as per the article), its just going down a different route, more AI focused. This is sensible because Cortana is a flop, nobody uses it, there is no need to leave it running.

I'm certain Apple has the same plans around AI, however people still use Siri all the time. It's not a flop, so it may as well stay running as more and more AI works its way over to it or its replacement.

It's really weird to me that anyone would want it shut down when it's so easy to just not use it.

I too actually bothered to read the article.

Cortana is trash. Bing's AI isn't perfect, but at least it's not afraid to say "I don't know", instead of hallucinating some made up bullshit every single time. I mean it still does it, but not nearly as often and you can always check the sources it provides to confirm.

It would be a lot better if it used Google search instead of Bing, however. Often times it can't find the answer that a Google search can. That merger will never happen, though.

This article sounds like it was written by someone who barely understands what a voice assistant is, let alone how a corporation works. Very dumb. Is 9to5 using GPT instead of paying journalists?

Not to mention that microsoft is definitely going to replace it with bing powered by chatgpt. They probably found that it was easier starting bing from the ground up now than having to deal with whatever has been shoved into cortana's code over the years.

Please not Siri, it ain’t smart but it does everything I want - the basics and reasonably easily.

I remember Cortana fondly when it was a great blend of Siri and Google Now but naturally it and Windows Phone got left to rot, and made her useless on desktop Windows since they forfeited my pocket.

I tolerated Google Assistant for a bit but ditched Android when Google pushed updates to remove the “okay Google with the screen off” feature from my Moto Z Play and gaslit the internet - stating it was never supported in closed support threads, the chipset didn’t support it and promoted it as a (then new) Pixel 1 feature. I figured Apple wouldn’t remove “Hey Siri” and so far several years in it’s still holding true.

Okay google works fine when the screen is off for me. On S22+ with latest Android

I know it's still a feature for many, not saying it's still a Pixel exclusive today, this was several years ago

I miss the squeeze to activate Google assistant. I used that all the time, but since I upgraded my pixel and it's no longer an option, I just don't use it ever.

I don't miss it at all. Every time I put my phone in my cupholder, it would activate, but when I actually needed it to work, it just wouldn't.

It’s too embedded into their services at the moment. Like you can’t even use CarPlay unless you enable Siri. I like the idea but in contrast they could also just try to make it good lol.

not only that, they also sell smart speakers whose only interaction is with siri. Shutting down siri would turn those $300 speakers into paper weights. this article is a really bad take.

Whoa, you need Siri enabled for CarPlay?! I refuse to have any voice things turned on any devices and I’ve been considering upgrading my horribly slow double DIMM radio to a CarPlay radio. I guess I’ll skip that.

Yep. I don’t own a car, but I rented one and wanted to give CarPlay a spin for the first time. It was like please enable Siri. I ended up doing it, but became very annoyed with Siri not long after I brought the car back. Would definitely be an issue for me if I owned the thing instead of renting.

If you do any car shopping, just ask the dealer if you can try it. Would be a good way to verify if what I’m saying is still true.

That’s fair! Honestly I just want a Bluetooth connection that doesn’t have a 1-2 second delay. Maybe FLAC support from flash drives.

My current radio plays MPs from flash drives, but won’t let you CHANGE THE SONG if you’re not stopped. So I use my phone via BT, which has this awful delay when doing anything at all.

With my last car, I used my beloved Bluetooth to 3.5mm adapter, which connects instantly, has no delay, and sounds magnificent. I would happily do with this car… BUT THE RADIO DOESN’T HAVE A GOT DANG 3.5MM JACK.

I think the car I rented could do Bluetooth audio without using CarPlay. I don’t remember how good/bad the delay was though.

I am genuinely curious.. how could it possibly matter if there is a small delay on audio playback?

Watching video while parked? Impossible.

Volume down? Enjoy loud.

Forward? More song. No new song.

Bad. No delay good.

The only thing here that reads as English is the video use case. If I ever watched a video in my car I'd identify. But I don't and may never do that.

It’s ANNOYING when I change a track foward or turn down the volume for any reason and it DOESN’T DO THE THING for a while.

Is that really so difficult for you to grok?

Do you need it translated better?

It’s annoying because I have a device that DOESN’T DO THAT but I cannot plug it in as my car doesn’t have a standard 3.5mm jack or a way to plug an adopter in.

I don’t watch videos in my car, except when I’m waiting for someone to go to my car and I’m already in my car.

I was honestly just curious. I've used BT audio for years and that never really registered on my radar as a concern so I didn't know.

Fair! My BT adapter does everything instantly and going from that to sloooow BT is annoying.

I am also reasonably sure — not 100%, but reasonably — that Siri has something to do with the transcription process for visual voicemail.

I don't understand why the author sees AI as an alternative to Siri rather than a potential upgrade.

No. Siri is useful, especially when you can’t type. I use Siri a lot on my bike. Apple just needs to fix Siri.

I shut off asuch of Cortana on my desktop as I could. Not a wanted feature.

I can only imagine they're shutting it down to replace it with something with different branding, based on an LLM. Microsoft has gone all-in on LLMs and I'm sure they'd love some of that virtual assistant action if they were able to differentiate themselves.

Windows copilot . It’s available for testing in canary builds. And it kinda sucks even worse than Cortana did.

I have no idea why they're doing this. LLMs are a useful tool in certain areas, but they're by no means ready as the sort of universal assistant tool Microsoft is trying to position them as.

I use GitHub Copilot to make writing boilerplate code faster and easier, and it works really well for that, but I can't see any other computing tasks I engage in regularly benefiting from an AI assistant trying to get all up in my business.

I get why a lay person would misunderstand the capabilities of LLMs. They sound like a thinking person should sound, so they treat it like it's coming from a thinking person.

But how are all the (presumably) tech-literate Microsoft employees also confused by this? Anyone paying even a little attention should have seen numerous instances of LLMs confidently asserting "facts" that they pulled out of their asses. They are not the right tool for most of the stuff people use a voice/OS assistant for.

I have to assume it's the business guys up top hearing the "AI" buzzword and getting horny for capitalism but god damn

M$ was banking on horny teenagers to use Cortana. Thing is, they forgot the sexy bits.

Apple can’t kill Siri. Too many of its solutions rely on voice as the dominant input method. Accessibility for Mac / iOS, HomePod, CarPlay, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, AirPods, etc.

Also, Siri has about a 3rd of the voice assistant market, Cortana use was way below that.

God no. I use it when I can’t reach the phone. It isn’t perfect, but it still is valuable

I’m kinda glad it’s over. Cortana killed the very useful voice commands on Xbox (alongside the size and price of the Kinect).

Instead of “Xbox On” you had to actually instruct Cortana to turn it on. The same for the quick screenshot or changing the channel on TV or whatever. It was so good, my whole family was using it and this was in 2014ish when voice control was still fairly new. Cortana ruined all of that for a virtual assistant that barely worked and made Siri look like AI.

I use my Google assistant all the time...

...mostly to set timers.

Great for it though!

Not the same thing. Even though Siri is not great, I still use it for basic tasks.

I think most people saw that coming, Microsoft effectively sealed Cortana's fate when they relegated it to a standalone app