14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella attended Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference to present, or at least to try to, Cortana’s integration in Windows 10 and the productivity tools she can provide, but the demo proved to be a complete fiasco because the personal assistant got all voice commands totally wrong.
Cortana is now directly integrated into Windows 10 to help perform a number of tasks more easily, and Microsoft bragged about the speech recognition system that the service is based on, which should work flawlessly especially for native English speakers.
Whatcha sayin’?
But Satya Nadella proved everyone that some work still needs to be done in this area when he asked Cortana to “Show me my most at-risk opportunities.”
Cortana reacted instantly, as she usually does, by opening a Bing page for the following query:
“Show me to buy milk at this opportunity.”
Everyone laughed, even Nadella did, although he was obviously embarrassed, so he tried to demo Cortana for the second time, with the exact same command. Once again, the Windows 10 personal assistant failed to work correctly and got the command all wrong, launching reminders. The third and the last attempt was unsuccessful too, so Satya Nadella gave up and continued the demo without Cortana.
Cortana is Microsoft’s big bet in the personal assistant world, and after previously launching it on Windows Phone, the company’s now working to bring it on all Windows devices. After the debut on PCs, Cortana could soon arrive in cars, as Microsoft’s reportedly seeking partners for a project that would eventually allow drivers to perform a number of tasks with voice commands using Cortana’s capabilities.
Microsoft hasn’t confirmed such plans, but Windows in the Car is not a new concept for the company, so chances are that we’re going to hear more about it as partners are found to continue development in this area.
