my less intelligent cortana

[Tomanband]

Like everybody else I upgraded to 8.1 today.

I changed my regional settings from Switzerland to United States in order to get Cortana, this worked, but my version of Cortana seems to be less capable than what has been shown previously:

almost all speech commands result in a web search, no intelligent cortana answer, I even tried the questions for which cortana is supposed to give funny answers (a wpcentral news from a few days ago)
also the public transportation reported here: What Cortana’s doing right and wrong (so far) | Pocketnow does not seem to work for me
Additionally: Is there a way to make cortana remember that I want my weather in celsius?

Simple stuff like turn wifi off or open facebook or the weather work...

does anyone else have this problem?

 

[ashram]

well, a few things. 1st, it took about 2 hours before Cortana wanted to lean more about me. Now she seems fine.

as for public transportation? no clue.
As for the temps, could be because the US uses F, that it defaults to that?

 

[Toink]

The way I observe it, Cortana in 'her' current state, is dependent on our voice's intonations and pronunciations. I've got good results so far. 'She' even joked about her dancing skills when I asked her if she could dance.



or when I asked her to tell a joke:



With regards to the temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius, just tell her to convert the result to Celsius

 

[narv]

From a few other threads going on around here, seems some people got a bug when updating to 8.1 and cortana only does web searches, but a hard reset seems to be fixing it for everyone that has reported so far.

 

[a5cent]

also the public transportation reported here: What Cortana’s doing right and wrong (so far) | Pocketnow does not seem to work for me

Bing has no information about public transportation outside the U.S.

Bing can't just know these things automagically. Getting Bing to interface with the thousands of data providers necessary to get this to work internationally is a lot of work. It is exactly things like this that are the reason why Cortana is still U.S. only. Forget it. Switzerland would be a rather simple country to set this stuff up for (good quality information is available electronically and B2B portals exist), but being a small market that is firmly in Apple's hands makes it a lower priority for MS... unfortunately.

Additionally: Is there a way to make cortana remember that I want my weather in celsius?

Of course... you need to change your regional settings to a country where they use celcius, like Switzerland... you see the problem :-(

Simple stuff like turn wifi off or open facebook or the weather work...

Basically, any Cortana command that is focused on doing things on your phone will work fine. Anything that requires Cortana to access Bing for anything more than a basic web search (transportation, flight information, sports teams, stuff like that) will likely fail, unless you are more interested in U.S. football teams than, say, FC Basel.

In summery, it's not just out of spite that Cortana is being kept from the rest of the world. MS just isn't ready yet.

 

[Zeem Frostmaw]

I admit I expected there to be some holes in Cortana's knowledge of the UK given that it's a US release. But when it can't even understand the pronunciation of Manchester or identify a single rail station within 30 miles of my location, I have no idea how Microsoft intends to somehow make Bing competent in the UK in the space of a few months.

Who knows though, maybe MS will secure some deals with some UK knowledge banks to make it work. But until then, I won't miss her.

 

[Idiosyncrasy]

I am living in New Hampshire and we have a city called Manchester here as well. Cortana picks it up just fine. I've tried a few different contexts with her (for example: What's the best steak restaurant in Manchester, where can I mini-golf in Manchester, what's the best place to hide a body in Manchester), and so far she hasn't let me down

 

[Anand Ramabhadran]

Do you guys have cortana in ua apps list???!

 

[Zeem Frostmaw]

I am living in New Hampshire and we have a city called Manchester here as well. Cortana picks it up just fine. I've tried a few different contexts with her (for example: What's the best steak restaurant in Manchester, where can I mini-golf in Manchester, what's the best place to hide a body in Manchester), and so far she hasn't let me down

Lucky you? Nah, I think it's probably an accent thing. Either way, Cortana has seriously disappointed me and I'm not sure how much Microsoft will be able to do to amend it.

 

[a5cent]

I am living in New Hampshire and we have a city called Manchester here as well. Cortana picks it up just fine. I've tried a few different contexts with her (for example: What's the best steak restaurant in Manchester, where can I mini-golf in Manchester, what's the best place to hide a body in Manchester), and so far she hasn't let me down

I suspect these things are being supplied by foursquare, not Bing. Just a hunch...

 

[Zeem Frostmaw]

Curiously, speaking to the basic TellMe voice recognition, it actually understands me a lot better than Cortana does. Seems there is a real difference between how the language settings work between US and UK English. =) Promising.

 

[0robert0]

A few days ago I signed up for developers preview and downloaded to WP 8.1 OS and I get most of the new functions like action centre and several other features but I don't why I cant get or find Cortana this being in the UK ?

 

[Zeem Frostmaw]

A few days ago I signed up for developers preview and downloaded to WP 8.1 OS and I get most of the new functions like action centre and several other features but I don't why I cant get or find Cortana this being in the UK ?

Long story short, Cortana and the Bing service behind it isn't optimal for UK users yet, so they've hidden the feature unless you change all region and language settings to US English.

As I found out the hard way though, US English may not be able to understand what you're saying as accurately as UK English. It may be best to just save yourself the hassle and wait a few months for the UK release.