Microsoft finally brought a contrary to Apple’s Siri. Cortana, the new personal digital assistant for the windows OS 8.1 users, is powered by Bing with the voice of the Halo voice actor Jen Taylor, and can be utilized through speech or typing.
The developers of this technology have made great efforts to make it better than Siri, Apple’s stumbling assistant for the Iphone. They studied many other assistants including actual human assistants, keepers of executive calendars and interceptors of phone calls. After analysing them, they concluded that virtual assistants need to do a better job of anticipating their bosses’ needs.
“Siri is this anthropomorphized character, but Siri doesn’t know you personally,”, co-vice president of Microsoft’s OS group, said in an interview.
Late last week in a conference, Belfiore demonstrated Cortana’s Siri-like basic features, with similar shortcomings. Users can use her to set calendar appointments with voice commands like “Schedule a phone call with Jim at 2 p.m. tomorrow.”
Belfiore also showed how Cortana thinks beyond Siri to figure out what users want before they even ask for it. If you keep searching for cricket scores, local traffic conditions and news on the stock exchnge, she will herself start to proactively display fresh data about those topics prominently.
Given permission, Cortana can also examine a user’s email to check airline reservations and warn if a flight is delayed. If there is heavy traffic to airport on the day of departure, Cortana notifies the users that they should leave early.
It will become much clear whether Cortana has a real edge over Siri, only when it is use by the masses.
During its early days, Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri also had many performance issues that rendered it unavailable when people wanted to use it. Though Apple has improved its technology still there are many issues to be resolved. Cortana may also have to face similar problems but it is highly likely that it perform better.
References
www.techgig.com
Bhanu Vrat
IIIT-ALLAHABAD(MS-CLIS)