“It was weird to own a Zune in 2005,” remembers a new article in the Verge. “It is even weirder to own a Zune in 2021 — let alone 16 of them. And yet, 27-year-old Conner Woods proudly shows off his lineup on a kitchen table.”
They come in all different colors, shapes, and sizes, and each can be identified by that…
Tag: Cortana
Dell’s New Monitors Have a Dedicated Microsoft Teams Button
Dell is launching three new monitors next month, and all of them come with a dedicated Microsoft Teams button. The Verge reports: Dell claims it has created the “world’s first video conferencing monitors certified for Microsoft Teams,” after Microsoft started certifying displays, webcams, and headsets last year. Three monitors will be available next month, all offering quick access to Microsoft Teams….
Microsoft’s Cortana Drops Consumer Skills as it Refocuses on Business Users
With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skills. From a report: That’s very much in line with Microsoft’s new focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans….
Suspicion and Anger Towards Microsoft Rises After Windows 10 Search Failure
Earlier this week, searching in Windows 10 was broken, “with a black bar showing where search results should be, even for those who tried to perform a local search of their files.” Microsoft issued a fix and blamed the issue on a “third-party networking fiber provider”. But unfortunately, Microsoft’s fix isn’t working for everyone — and that’s just the beginning. Long-time…
Have a First Aid Question? Don’t Ask Siri Or Cortana.
AmiMoJo quotes Mashable: A new study from the University of Alberta, published Tuesday in the medical journal The BMJ, tested smart assistants Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Assistant on their ability to respond helpfully to first aid questions. While Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa way outperformed Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, the results as a whole were underwhelming. The researchers asked…
Skype Audio Graded by Workers in China With ‘No Security Measures’
A Microsoft program to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with “no security measures,” according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company. From a report: The recordings, both deliberate…
Microsoft’s Andrew Shuman on the Cortana App’s Death, Natural Language, and Alexa
An anonymous reader writes: Last month, news broke that Microsoft was killing off Cortana for Android and iOS and was removing Cortana from its Launcher app for Android. On January 31, 2020, Microsoft will end support for the Cortana app in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K. Microsoft refocusing Cortana for the enterprise, and specifically for Windows…
Microsoft Will Shut Down To-do App Wunderlist on May 6
Over two and a half years after Microsoft said it’d one day kill to-do service Wunderlist in favor of its own To Do app, it has revealed when it’ll drop the ax: May 6th. From a report: After that time, Wunderlist’s to-do lists won’t sync anymore and you’ll have a limited time to export lists from there into To Do. As…
Microsoft Winds Down Its Bigger Plans for Cortana With Mobile App Shutdown
At Microsoft’s Ignite conference this month, the company announced a new vision for its personal productivity assistant, Cortana — one which aimed to make it more useful in your day-to-day work, including email, but one which also saw Microsoft scaling its ambitions back from Cortana as a true Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant competitor. Now, the other shoe has dropped, as…
Amazon Is Poorly Vetting Alexa’s User-Submitted Answers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana can answer all sorts of questions that pop into users’ heads, and they’re improving every day. But what happens when a company like Amazon decides to crowdsource answers to fill gaps in its platform’s knowledge? The result can range from amusing and perplexing to concerning. Alexa Answers…