Cortana USA vs UK Edition

[Jcmg62]

Hi All

I'm hoping to reach out to USA Cortana users to better understand what new developments have happened within Cortana over the past few months that maybe we aren't seeing here in the UK yet.

To set the scene, I'll start by saying that I've been a Cortana user since day 1 and continue to use it daily. In those first few months over in the UK we had to change the regional settings on the phone and "trick" the device into thinking we were USA based....ahh, good times

What I haven't seen is any particularly big steps forward in her capabilities over the past 4-6 months. Granted, I'm still on WP8.1 so maybe I'll see huge changes when my Lumia 950 gets here at the end of the week.

Is Cortana still evolving in the USA? And what big changes have taken place that maybe we're not seeing over here?

 

[Pedro Bustos]

Hi I know you want to speak to US users, but interested (as a UK user) to learn your Cortana experience.

I was until yesterday, using Cortana (UK version), but I have now turned her off.

None of the advertised functions have ever worked for me:

Flight tracking, time to leave being the two main things which have never worked.

A lot of the available Interests also don't work (even though they were enabled):

Public transport, Footy predictions, live scores.

Doea all of this work for you?
Is the "time to leave" function reliable?

Thanks for reading!

P.

 

[Jcmg62]

Hi Pedro, sorry for the delay in responding....the Christmas holidays got in the way

I'm afraid I can't offer any good news regarding your question; Cortana seems to have taken a big step backwards in the move from windows 8.1 to 10.

The biggest feature which has stopped working is a reliable "hey Cortana" service. This is something I used several times a day on my Lumia 1520 on windows 8.1. On my Lumia 950 windows 10 it is just as buggy as hell and refuses to work. I've tried soft resets, hard resets and extensive voice training....it just refuses to work.

On top of that, there's very little chat from Cortana. The vast majority of questions simply bring up a bing search. I've also never had it/her track a package or flight automatically, which is strange as I order a lot of parcels for work and every time the delivery company sends me an email with the order number, delivery number, delivery address, etc so Cortana should have plenty of data to pick up and track those orders, but doesn't.

I think the biggest issue comes down to expectation; Microsoft has put out a lot of television advertising showing off reliable Cortana features that just don't work as they should.

If MS hadn't pushed these services through heavy advertising then no one would really have the expectations that Microsoft have created.