Windows 10: Cortana Usage

I've long dreamed of the Star Trek/Tony Stark-like ability to talk to my computer. I had previously played around with Windows speech recognition years ago, and was excited by the addition of Cortana to Windows, being a big halo fan, but in late 2018 I'm still faced with the same limitation, that there are a lack of good, reasonable, and affordable ways to get your speech input into your PC beyond sitting directly in front of it, or being tethered to it in one way or another.


I recently picked up an Amazon Echo on black Friday sale for $25, and while I was thrilled with the ease and functionality (and limited Cortana capability) of the device that I received for such a modest price, I couldn't help but be a bit bothered that my current problem still hasn't been solved at this point in the game. Part of me asks "why did I buy this thing?" I have my entire house wired for my PC. I can view my desktop or listen to audio from it in any room. Yet, when I'm viewing the screen comfortably from my couch, on my projector, controlling my smart devices with their apps, I can only click on Cortana with my wireless keyboard, making her lonely halo pulse with no way for me to actually talk to her. Technologically, we're so close. It's right there, nearly within reach. It almost feels cruelly intentional.


I've tried a few of the less expensive boundary microphones available. None of those came close to how well the echo can pick up my voice from even another room, none of those options were wireless, and all were more expensive than a full price echo. As of Windows 8, A2DP sink (not talking about A2DP "source" here, I mean "sink") isn't supported by the windows bluetooth driver, which even more severely limits your options of getting your voice into your PC. If you were looking for a way of wirelessly speaking with Cortana with something like a wearable device, it seems as though Microsoft doesn't want it to be over bluetooth.


It's known that companies sell things like game consoles at break even or even at a loss, intending to make that up and then some on the sale of games, services, peripherals, etc... I could only assume the same to be true for for things like the Amazon echo and Google home, given just how well the voice pickup functionality is compared to a purpose built microphone that's double the cost or more. I can only speculate, but have to guess, that requirements of theoretical device that would provide the same voice pickup/processing capability, and simply allow you to wirelessly transmit that to your PC, but without all the additional smart assistant features built into it, would be more simple and less costly to construct, foregoing the need for speakers, memory storage, lights etc... So why isn't such a product available from Microsoft or others? Am I the only one out there that wants this? If said device were to exist, you could bet that I would have already been asking Cortana on my PC to do many of the things that I am currently asking Alexa to do on my Echo.

:)

 

Cortana Notebook

In order to enable the Notebook icon in Cortana, I suggest you to check if you have enabled Cortana.

To enable Cortana, please follow the steps below:

• Go to Cortana.
• Go to Settings.
• Turn on “Cortana can give you suggestions, ideas, reminders, alerts”.

Hope this helps.

 

Cortana Again Causing Terabytes Network Activity

Cortana will not run in a local account. hence, the usage history of searching will still run. We suggest that you disable the
Indexing Options. Follow these steps:

• Press Windows key + X.
• Click Control Panel.
• Click Indexing Options.
• From there you can modify and disable the search history of your computer.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

 

Cortana stopped showing my calendar events on cortana home

Hi,

Thank you for your interest in Windows 10.

I suggest you to try to turn Cortana off and then try turning it on back and check. Refer to the steps below to turn Off and On Cortana:

• Open Cortana.
• Click the hamburger button in the top left of the window.
• Go to settings and click on off.
• Follow the same steps to turn it on.
• Check if issue persists.

Hope this information is helpful. Please do let us know if you need further assistance, we’ll be glad to assist you.