Windows 10: Need help getting Cortana to be less useless.

Well, all that I was able to make Cortana do is show me the weather...

I say "Hey Cortana", nothing happens. I need to actually press the microphone button to make her start listening.
I say "Open windows update", she says "Try that again after future updates"
I say "Open Google Chrome", she opens a bing search with "Open Google Chrome".

What's the stuff she's good at ?


So far, every time I tried an 'artificial human', either on the phone, either on my PC, that's supposed to be amazing and smart, there was always a problem. Not smart enough.

PS: Any way to work around her working in the foreground ? I mean, when she's doing something, if I Alt+Tab somewhere else she stops her work, and I find that pretty annoying.

:)

 

Cortana Alpha Canada, she seems to be getting less capable over time

No, it is still in Alpha testing, not even Beta testing. You can get it with the Developer Preview installed.

 

Cortana Alpha Canada, she seems to be getting less capable over time

Hi Carl,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Support. In regards to your concerns with Cortana and Canada, I'd like to go over a few things and see if it may help alleviate some of the issues you seem to be having with it.

So with Cortana, we'll want to try and clear some of her settings in the following order:

• First, turn off Cortana entirely.
• Clear the history for Internet Explorer on your phone, and clear the temporary files under the Storage Sense App.
• Turn off location services under Settings>Location.
• On your computer, login to bing.com on your computer. Then go to the Gear icon in the upper right and go to Settings>Personalization. Clear the Cortana data you see here.
• Going back to the phone now, do a power cycle by holding both the Power Button and Volume Down until the phone restarts.
  
• When the phone back on, navigate to Settings>Email+Accounts, and then tap and hold your Microsoft Account and sync it.
  
• When the account sync is done, turn on Location Services again and Cortana. When enabling Cortana again, try also deleting any interests you may have set on the phone and adding them back.

Try again to search and see if this helps. Let us know how it goes for you and we'll go from there.

Regards,

 

For me, Cortana is severely glitched right now. I suspect they are working to get it integrated further into the OS and Spartan properly.
It's even buggered up on my Phone right now.
Probably wait til there's news of improvements in a new Build or so.

 

Good to know there's no reason to try. Looks like I'll wait for a new build to use her.

 

So far my experience with Cortana, when it works, is utter dismay. Speech recognition in 1998 worked better - at least you could tell it to open a word document and it would (after training it).

Cortana is good at opening Web pages - that's about it for now ... maybe it will get better, but if not I'll disable it in favor of a more useful search (third party is necessary).

Use settings on Cortana to turn it off, you can also tell it to stop learning about you in the Main Settings -> Cortana.

 

Cortana will sing and tell jokes.

 

Well I never used a 'personal assistant' on my PC before, and I figured that if it's here, ready to be used, why not give it a try ? I'll just go back to typing for now. It's faster anyways. (she takes too long to do her stuff)

 

That doesn't really make her less useless ...

 

Hi

The main thing I'm using Cortana for right now is playing my music.
I created a Cortana playlist with 10 hours of music in it, everything from Pavarotti to Willy Nelson, instrumental and what have you .

Now I just say "Hey Cortana, Play my music" and she replies Shuffling your music, or OK, playing your music and plays from the list at random.

It doesn't get boring because I never know what's going to come up next.
Right now she's playing Peter Paul and Mary.

I can do this from the other side of the room if I'm sitting reading or something.

But you are right there isn't much that she can do right now.
I want her to open software, take email dictation, and send it, etc.

She does do a pretty good job of searching the web, and some of her jokes are funny, I hope they keep updating with new ones.
Maybe that's something that Microsoft could add, a way for people to submit jokes for Cortana, (Microsoft Approved of Course). LOL

Mike

 

You did ask what she is good at.

 

I found that to be rather disappointing, actually.
They probably spent a lot of time and money programing the feature to respond to stupid questions with smart a** answers just to show 'her' off, but, to get 'her' to perform a gainful task!? Not there yet! *Sad

 

If MS is still trying for a release to OEMs by June, Cortana should start getting some major updates. If they want me to talk to my computer Cortana needs a lot of improvement. *Smile

 

Yeh, and I've heard she's ugly and wears army boots!