What should Cortana do for you?

[Jcmg62]

Cortana could be a major step forward for Windows Phone if Microsoft get this right.

Both Siri and Google Now have promised something close to true artificial intelligence without quite getting there. In fact, having used both, its fair to say that, once your past a few built in auto responses, all they really do is run google searches and activate your diary to tell you when you have an appointment coming up.......yawn. Bottom line, they're still a long way off of becoming truly intelligent.

Microsoft has chosen a good time to launch Cortana. The movie Her, with Joaquin Phoenix, has generated a resurgence in what true artificial intelligence is and what we can do with it.

So, what should we expect of Cortana? Should it be a simple, instruction taking app designed to help us find our nearest burger king?

Should Microsoft give Cortana a personality? Or....at the very least, the ability to develop a personality based on how the user interacts with it. If it has the capacity to develop a personality through interaction......should it have a reset button in case we don't like the way its learning?

One of the finer balancing acts is how much information we're prepared to share with our new AI buddy.

Personally, I think the Cortana experience will be far better for the user if it has access to as much info as possible (address book, diary, social and business media, maps, geo-locations, photos and business directories as well as bing) but equally I can see how that's not going to sit well with everyone.

So what should Microsoft do to give Cortana the edge? What features should it have?

From the moment you press the button to activate it, what should it look like?

Have you tried siri or google now before? What was missing in that experience that you'd like to see in Cortana?

 

[boshkop]

I really hope it'll be more than just a notifications reader (I haven't user Siri or Google Now), but honestly I doubt it will be much more than that.

My realistic expectations are that it will mainly use Bing for searches, they will introduce couple of new features (but nothing special) and all this will be wrapped in one shiny marketing campaign.

Fingers crossed to be totally wrong.

 

[a5cent]

The AI research community estimates we are at least two decades away from anything similar to 'her'. I expect it's quite a lot more.

So, unfortunately, I think people are getting their hopes up too high. I expect it to match the abilities of Google Now, while being a bit better than Siri at faking a personality, but not much better. All the responses will still be pre-scripted.

It definitely won't sound like the AI from the Halo games either. Voice pitch may be similar, but we are still far from achieving a synthesized voice that sounds natural.

 

[theefman]

Don't think I'll get much use out of this, not a WP 8.1 feature i really care about and can't think of anything it does that I can't currently do so not seeing the point of it apart from bragging rights.