Cortana has become useless for me

[gwinegarden]

Cortana was never highly useful, to me, but it has been going downhill for some time.

Hey Cortana went away, way back, and has never reappeared. This is ridiculous!

Today, I brought up Cortana and said "set a timer for 10 minutes" she replied "I'm sorry, but I can't help with that yet".

Seriously!? Now she cannot even set a timer? This is beyond ridiculous.

 

[me just saying]

there had been a lot of changes with cortana since the first of the year. it is getting away from consumer oriented to focus on business. There are a lot of features that will no longer work with it. You should be able to use alexa on your win10 computers to do what cortana used to do. check the microsoft store for it if interested.

 

[mggm100]

My favorite Cortana feature was one of the first to be disabled, location-based actions. I used it to turn off sounds when arriving at some places I went to on a regular schedule. I think Cortana's peak was at its launch. It has been a long downhill slide since then.

 

[gwinegarden]

Well, I solved my problems. I just installed Alexa.

 

[RTGent]

Cortana was never highly useful, to me, but it has been going downhill for some time.

Hey Cortana went away, way back, and has never reappeared. This is ridiculous!

Today, I brought up Cortana and said "set a timer for 10 minutes" she replied "I'm sorry, but I can't help with that yet".

Seriously!? Now she cannot even set a timer? This is beyond ridiculous.

She still handles timers simply and effectively on my Lumia 950. I always say please

 

[tgp]

She still handles timers simply and effectively on my Lumia 950. I always say please

Just a few days ago my wife asked Google Assistant to set a timer, and she added "please!" She was amused when GA replied with something like "Thank you for the kind words!"

 

[me just saying]

Just a few days ago my wife asked Google Assistant to set a timer, and she added "please!" She was amused when GA replied with something like "Thank you for the kind words!"

both alexa and google will respond to thank you, please and other polite phases.

 

[RalphieD]

I still have four Invokes plugged in and so some things with it but now have three Alexa devices too. Cortana and the Invoke was so ahead when it first came out but no support from MicroSoft. I must say using Alexa now, it is so much better between what it can do and how it responds.

Also so sad when you touch the top and listen to what Cortana has to say

 

[djarchow]

What irritates me most lately is Cortana keeps popping up all day long despite no one saying "hey Cortana". What is even worse is Microsoft apparently isn't filtering out what is being sent through the computers speakers so Cortana hears everything being said through the speakers. When I was in a MS teams meeting the other day Cortana kept popping up and trying to answer things people on the call were saying. So like every 5 minutes they kept hearing Cortana say "Sorry, I can't help with that yet"

The other thing that is broken, is that when she does open up and can't help anyway, about 10% of the time, that dialog box doesn't have a close X icon, so it just sits over top of my other windows until I reboot..

Such a terrible waste given how good Cortana was back in the WP 8.1 days.

 

[me just saying]

imo, unless you are using it in a business environment it would be best to disable it.