The Harman Kardon Invoke was fine. But let’s be real — the first Cortana smart speaker was dead on arrival. Microsoft’s smart assistant has its strong suits, but thus far statement of purpose hasn’t been among them. CEO Satya Nadella appears to have acknowledge as much this week during a media event at the company’s […]
View More Microsoft is calling an audible on smart speakersCategory: Cortana
Microsoft wants Cortana to do for the workplace what Alexa did for the smart home
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In the span of a few short years, voice has taken center stage in the smart home. Thanks to advancements in natural-language processing that spawned digital assistants like Siri and the breakthrough gadget that was the Amazon Echo, it’s now a totally normal thing to talk to your house — for tasks as varied as setting timers to arming security systems.
In the workplace, however, voice is way behind. A recent survey found that just 28 percent of businesses use voice in their workflows at all. This isn’t for lack of interest: The same survey said 85 percent of businesses plan to integrate voice within the next year. And while Alexa and Google Assistant dominate the consumer smart speaker market, businesses are looking very expectantly at Cortana, since many of them are already Microsoft customers. Read more…
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View More Microsoft wants Cortana to do for the workplace what Alexa did for the smart homeMicrosoft hopes enterprises will want to use Cortana
In a world dominated by Alexa and the Google Assistant, Cortana suffers the fate of a perfectly good alternative that nobody uses and everybody forgets about. But Microsoft wouldn’t be Microsoft if it just gave up on its investment in this space, so it’s now launching the Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise to see if […]
View More Microsoft hopes enterprises will want to use CortanaYou can now use Alexa and Cortana to control your Xbox
You can now control the Xbox from Alexa and Cortana. Microsoft announced his morning it’s introducing a new way to interact with Xbox One using voice commands, by way of an Xbox Skill that works with both Alexa and Cortana, across platforms. The skill will allow users to launch games, adjust the volume, start and […]
View More You can now use Alexa and Cortana to control your XboxAlexa and Cortana are finally on speaking terms
In a move reminiscent of Cher’s friendship with Tai, the baddest bitch in the digital assistant schoolyard has a new project. Thanks to the peacemaking powers of the A.I. overlords, Alexa is now on intimate speaking terms with former rival Cortana! B…
View More Alexa and Cortana are finally on speaking termsGoogle Assistant is still a lot smarter than Siri, new study shows
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In the battle of digital assistants, a winner is emerging: Google Assistant is smartest of them all, followed by Siri, Cortana and Alexa.
That’s according to a new study by LoupVentures, whose team asked the four digital assistants 800 questions each. All of them have shown big improvements since LoupVentures’ last test, conducted in April — with Siri making the biggest leap forward — but they’re still far from perfect.
All four assistants were great at understanding queries — Google Assistant had a 100% success rate, Apple’s Siri understood 99% of queries, and Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa were only slightly behind with a 98% success rate. Read more…
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Cortana’s big challenge: Catching up to Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant
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When Google wowed the tech world with its demo of Duplex — the tech that allows its digital Assistant make phone calls to perform mundane tasks like booking haircuts or making restaurant reservations — Microsoft’s Cortana chief was impressed, but not worried.
“The technologist in me had no choice but to feel impressed,” Javier Soltero, Microsoft corporate vice president of Cortana, told me in a far-ranging discussion about voice technology for Mashable’s MashTalk podcast. “The idea that a computer can generate a voice with the right processes, right inflection, all of the right things to mimic humans, is amazing to see in practice, but not entirely surprising.” Read more…
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Here’s how Amazon’s Alexa will work with Microsoft’s Cortana
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We just got our first taste of how digital assistants will talk to each other.
At its Build 2018 developers conference, Microsoft showed how its AI assistant, Cortana, will interact with Amazon Alexa, assuming you use both. Since many use Alexa at home but Microsoft products at work, an integration would be a bridge between personal conveniences like ordering Ubers or playing music and task-oriented needs like calendars and business communication.
This is a major first step toward voice-controlled systems interacting with one another, with one filling in where the other comes short. Companies like Apple may allow their digital assistants to interact with specific services — ask Siri to show you the best-reviewed restaurant nearby and it will display a list with star ratings from Yelp and OpenTable — but this pairing appears to go deeper. Read more…
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Microsoft shows off Alexa-Cortana integration, launches sign-up website for news
Microsoft still isn’t giving a timeline as to when its virtual assistant, Cortana, will support integration with Amazon Alexa – something the companies had announced last year. But the company at its Build developer conference today did show off how that integration will work, in an on-stage demo with support from Amazon, and it launched a new […]
View More Microsoft shows off Alexa-Cortana integration, launches sign-up website for newsDigital assistants just took a big step toward real ‘human’ conversation
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Talking to Alexa is too often a one-sided affair. Certainly, the primary purpose of a digital assistant is to listen, but its responses tend to favor cold efficiency — get in and get out. If a human spoke to you the same way, you’d think they were being passive aggressive in order to get you to shut up and leave them alone.
While this dynamic makes sense from a utilitarian perspective, it runs counter to the stated goals of all digital assistants (Siri, Google Assistant, and the rest) — that being conversational language.
To really take their usefulness to the next level, digital assistants need to understand more than just words. They have to take into account context and even the mood or personality of the speaker. Read more…
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Microsoft Teams will integrate with Cortana, add transcription and translation features
Microsoft Teams, the company’s team collaboration software and challenger to Slack, announced this morning- on its first anniversary – a suite of new features that will roll out to the software throughout 2018. This includes features that will allow users to record, transcribe and save meetings to the cloud, integrations with voice assistant Cortana, inline message translation… Read More
Microsoft and Xioami to collaborate on AI, cloud computing and hardware
After Microsoft signed a deal to test Windows 10 on Xiaomi devices in 2015 and then Xiaomi bought a trove of patents to help run other Microsoft services on its devices in 2016, today the two companies announced another chapter in its collaboration. Xiaomi and Microsoft have signed a Strategic Framework Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to work more closely in the areas of cloud computing,… Read More