I have been looking at Cortana on Windows 10 and trying out some of its functions. Cortana is built into the search window and integrated into Bing so the two are simultaneously supporting each other. You can make appointments, search maps and look for local restaurants. Much of which I wouldn’t need to do. There is a feature which lets you alert when you need to set off back home from work. Useful for me these days !
How good is the recognition?
Best to wait till the full version. I am using Windows 10 build 10074 which is not the latest. In this version its accuracy is medium to poor. It often gets the ending of what I say wrong. I tried different ways of saying it but as with any speech recognition system if it doesn’t pick it up it isn’t going to be great. I suspect the major use of Cortana will be on mobile phones and that may show its true potential.
Compared to Siri?
Siri and Contana do similar responses.For instance, when I ask ” Can you book me an appointment?” Siri replies ” When is the appointment?” and Cortana says ” When is your event?” Asked what the traffic is like on the M4 today – Siri takes me to a relevant map of where the blockages are whereas Cortana takes me to a generic website. Cortana plays my music on request on the command ” Play music” and Siri takes you to a playlist.
Overall Cortana does OK as these systems do. Will it replace typing? No, other more specialist speech recognition systems do this. This is another tool to add to the toolkit that users can use if they find useful;. How useful to each individual will be the question?
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