Recently, the closed beta version of Cortana for Android was leaked to the network. Let me remind you that this is a voice assistant from the company Microsoft, which can become the main competitor to Siri and Google Now. Let's see what Cortana is at the moment …
Introduction
When a company acts as a catch-up, focusing on the already existing solutions of competitors, it is always tempted to take the best of both worlds and try to mold some kind of a single whole out of this. At first glance, it seems that this is a win-win option that will appeal to everyone. In practice, such an attempt to sit on two chairs rarely ends in something good; as a result, the company succeeds in neither one nor the other, and such a product does not make any particular impression. You cannot enter the same river twice, and what seemed fresh and original a few years ago does not make any special impression today. To attract the attention of users, it is not enough to repeat someone else's idea of five years ago, you need to come up with something of your own. Something bright and interesting, to which they have not yet got used to.
The same Google Now was clearly created with an eye on Siri, it was clear to everyone that since the voice assistant appeared in iOS, then it should have appeared in Android. However, the way this assistant worked was completely different. Where in Apple they relied on human communication with a soulless piece of iron, Google tried to teach its program to predict user actions and give him the necessary information before he even voices a question.
In Microsoft, in a similar situation, they did not come up with anything new, but simply combined two ideas into one. On the one hand, Cortana will keep track of the user's interests and remind about the planned things, on the other hand, it will try to behave like a living interlocutor, and not a primitive computer program.
Installation
You can download the apk file leaked to the network from several different resources, for example, from the w3bsit3-dns.com forum. But first you need to think very well whether it is worth doing.
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Firstly, this is an unofficial beta, which can contain a huge number of vulnerabilities. Secondly, you download the file not from the official site, but from third-party sources. How he got there and who in it could 'dig' before this is unknown to us. And the program needs a lot of permissions to work.
One more thing – to work in the program, you need to log in using your account Microsoft. I don't think MS will decide to fight the 'illegal testers', but who knows.
At the moment the application works exclusively in English.
Key features
Let me remind you once again that we are talking about a beta version, and not even an official one. It is impossible to draw any final conclusions on it, it may well turn out that only a small part of the planned functionality is available in it. Another thing is that it's hard to believe in this, and if the technical flaws for the release are likely to be corrected, then the number of functions by the time of release is unlikely to change much.
The main screen of the program displays cards with information, clearly inherited from Google Now. Unlike the Google service, each card almost always takes up all the free space on the screen, so you can only view them one at a time. It is not yet clear whether they are of much use, initially it is just a selection of news and a weather forecast. Probably, over time, their content will somehow adjust to the interests of the user, but Google Now (which, by the way, is not enough stars from the sky), Cortana will clearly be far away. Especially if you don't use services Microsoft like Bing search and others. In the current beta, such hint cards are not at all impressive, suffice it to say that Cortana persistently showed me US news, although she knew perfectly well that I was in Russia (both by location on the map and by information from my MS account).
In the menu you can specify a list of your interests and customize the behavior of the program. For example, you can choose which news to display, set up notifications for scheduled events, add alerts for nearby restaurants of a particular price category, and so on.
For now, voice dialing can only be started by clicking on the corresponding button in the corner of the screen, no voice activation like 'Hi, Cortana!' not now. But with speech recognition everything is excellent – the program understands my clumsy pronunciation without any problems, which is already a lot. This, of course, is about English, there is no Russian in the beta. If, for some reason, it is inconvenient to pronounce the commands aloud at the moment, you can enter them from the keyboard by tapping on the text field at the bottom of the screen. Interestingly, in this case, Cortana will realize that it is worth being quiet, and will not say the answer aloud.
The assistant understands the standard set of commands – call a friend, send an SMS, create a note, add a reminder. It is better to form teams in such a way that all information fits in one sentence. For example, 'Remind me to buy milk tomorrow.' In theory, you can do this in several stages, for example, first say 'add a reminder', and only then fill in the 'what', 'where' and 'when' fields. But in this case, the data will have to be entered manually, voice control does not work here. It is also impossible to confirm the correctness of the entered data by voice (I, in any case, did not succeed), you must definitely tap the button. I would like to believe that in the final version all this will be implemented somehow differently, otherwise there will not be much sense from such voice control.
In beta, many commands do not work, there is no integration with Android applications yet. In principle, this is quite expected – that's why it is beta, and even unofficial. Although sometimes Cortana stumbles over very simple things that she herself suggests trying. For example, it flatly refuses to report the list of available commands.
In Microsoft it was not by chance that they named their program after the heroine of a computer game, endowed with a pleasant female voice and even the rudiments of a biography. The company was clearly trying to surpass (or at least duplicate) Siri's success by making its program as human as possible. Including taught her to answer a bunch of irrelevant questions.
Help from Wikipedia
Cortana is a fictional artificial intelligence character in the Halo series of games. Voiced by Jen Taylor. Cortana first appears in Halo: Combat Evolved and the sequels to Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 4. During the game, Cortana provides description and tactical information for the player, who plays John-117.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana
However, she is far from Siri at the moment. So far, Cortana cannot recognize even the simplest colloquial phrases like “I'm hungry,” “I want to sleep,” or “Find the nearest museum,” and it just returns a Bing search query. There is no need to talk about more complicated things, a direct comparison with Siri here will clearly not be in favor of MS's decision. Whether this is a beta feature for Android, or the service itself, I can’t judge.
What Cortana does really well is praising products Microsoft. Answers to questions from the series 'Which is better, Xbox or Play Station?' fly away from her teeth. As long as you talk to her about devices, games and services Microsoft, the illusion of a more or less meaningful dialogue even arises. But it is worth taking at least one step aside – and that's it, hello, Bing. Perhaps the main exception here is Siri, about which Cortana also does not mind mumbled.
Sometimes there is a suspicion that good, but very elderly programmers worked on teaching this virtual personality, who are slightly behind what is happening in the world and what topics are currently relevant. She can answer the question of which is better, Windows or Linux (five or seven years ago it was a really popular controversy), but she cannot compare Windows and Mac or Windows and Android. Can react to the name Siri, but won't even smile at the phrase 'Ok Google'. If Siri could say all sorts of stupid things and see what came of it, then with Cortana, you should always think about what issues are in her circle of interests.
First impressions
Microsoft you should clearly understand that releasing Cortana on WP (Windows Mobile) and on Android are fundamentally different things. In the first case, Cortana acts as the one and only voice assistant, initially integrated into the OS. In the second case, it faces stiff competition. The user will have to be convinced that in order to find out the weather or create a voice note, he definitely needs to replace Google Now with Cortana. Which so far cannot even be launched with a voice command, which does not understand a bunch of languages familiar to Google Now, which uses the not very popular Bing and is very poorly integrated with Android. Considering that all these assistants are not so much needed at all, only a few will be ready to change the awl for soap. To do this, users must have some real incentive, and the application must have some very solid advantage, but nothing of the kind is even on the horizon yet. Neither the MS solution, nor the voice assistants from other companies, which are enough on Google Play. It's not even that Google Now is so good, it's just that its competitors (available on Android) look even paler.
The only good thing about Cortana is the desktop version Windows, which most people use. Probably, in theory, you can come up with such a use case in which a single voice assistant on a PC and a smartphone will give some advantages. True, they stubbornly do not come to my mind. Especially considering the fact that such applications are needed even less on a PC than on a phone. On a mobile device, it is indeed sometimes easier to ask a question by voice than to type from the on-screen keyboard, especially when your hands are busy. On a PC, it is much easier to poke at the browser icon and drive a request from the keyboard in a second, rather than trying to dictate all this into the microphone. In addition, the same Google Now for PC has also existed for a long time, but I very much doubt that someone uses it there.
If you need some real benefit from the voice assistant, then there is clearly no point in changing Google Now to Cortana, at least on a Android smartphone. The set of voice commands they will have about the same, but at the same time Google Now will always be better integrated into Android and will obviously give more accurate prompts – this is a proprietary Google chip that the company has been doing for many years. And the Google services themselves are much more popular (maps, search engine, mail, calendar), which is why this company will have more information about the user in most cases. While Google Now knew from the very first launch where I live, where I work, what my hobbies are, Cortana is trying to convince me for the second day in a row that the local showdown between Donald Trump and Senator McCain is an “interesting story.” It is clear that the final version of the program will become smarter, but that some miracle should not be expected now. Anyway, at Android.
If you just want to install a funny talking toy on your phone that you can brag to your friends, you better install some Talking Tom, there will be much more laughter and positive emotions.
