2y ago

Microsoft shuts down Cortana app on Windows 11

www.theverge.com Microsoft shuts down Cortana app on Windows 11

Farewell, Cortana.

Microsoft shuts down Cortana app on Windows 11 | The digital assistant was first part of Windows Phone and now it’s being discontinued on Windows.

www.theverge.com /2023/8/11/23828311/microsoft-shuts-down-cortana-windows-11

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TechNews @radiation.party

VERGE

Microsoft shuts down Cortana app on Windows 11

www.theverge.com /2023/8/11/23828311/microsoft-shuts-down-cortana-windows-11

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65 comments

Cortana is/was by far the best name of the digital assistants - probably because it was created by sci-fi story writers rather than a marketing department. They should just have upgraded her with the latest AI tech and trained her to show the same kind of sassy personality as in the games and it would have been perfect.
Who in their right mind thinks "Bing copilot" is a better name? It makes me picture something like the blow-up autopilot from Airplane!
- Cortana was a great name also because in Halo she turned evil, which is fitting for an MS product. Bing copilot gives me strong Clippy vibes.
  
  Bungie Studios had a habit of naming their AIs after mythological French swords; Durandal in Marathon, and Cortana in Halo. Microsoft ought to name their new AI assistant Hauteclaire or Joyeuse or something else that follows the theme, but I very much suspect that it's going to be named by a committee of marketing execs. Much more likely to find scholars and poets developing software than in the C-suite.
- I agree. At first I thought the goal was to get rid of an assistant in general, but just renaming it to something worse is confusing.
- I generally agree with you, and Microsoft has always been notoriously awful at naming just about anything. The still are.
  But Cortana's reputation has been ruined to the point where there's no coming back from it. It was a good name, but a lousy product. From a marketing perspective, it's far, far, easier to start from scratch with a better product than to try to repair the reputation of the old one.
- A "sassy personality" just puts the assistant into the uncanny valley for me. I prefer it to just do its job and not try to fool me into anthropomorphizing it.
  But the name was pretty cool, though, as noted by another commenter, not the easiest to pronounce.
- Bing copilot gives me Clippy vibes altogether.
  
  AHH poor Clippy you will be missed
- I don't know why but out of all of the alternatives I found Alexa by far the easiest to say (sorry to all the people named Alexa out there). Okay google, hey Siri, Bixby, Cortana are just hard to pronounce.
  
  You a non-native English speaker? I'd have thought the letter X would have made Alexa and Bixby hardest to pronounce for most people, and Siri and Cortana the easiest. Spanish stress pattern for 'Cortana' doesn't match English, making it harder to say it in a way that it recognises. But that's obviously just me - I'm Scottish, and none of these things have ever recognised a single word I say.
  One of the most-requested features on these smart assistants would be the ability to rename / nickname them, but that's an expensive ask. They all offload their actual voice processing to a cloud server somewhere, and then have their 'activation sounds' hard-coded into them. Needs to be either a few syllables in a row (hay-see-ree) or some unusual sequence (bicks-bee) to not have hundreds of false positives. Giving them nicknames would require them to send their voice samples to their back-end servers basically 24/7, which would cost them a fortune to run. And also be a privacy nightmare, but I'm sure the operators would be just fine with that if they could afford it.

I was told I can't remove it becuaee it is critical to windows system....

The only Windows update I'm gonna be happy to install asap
- Don't get too excited. They're just doing it so it doesn't get in the way of the Ai they'll be putting on there.

Entirely unsurprising to virtually everyone. Both them and Google release a ton of shovelware, just to fill a gap in the market, and it's never about being the best. It's always about being the first, no matter how poor the product's design or quality are
- They are preparing to shovel chatgpt with a new name called copilot. Will soon be on every machine running windows 11.
  
  That would be a pretty stupid thing to call it, since they already have a product called copilot which is a coding assist tool powered by chat gpt.

Now that games run so well on Linux I have pretty much shut down windows in it's entirety from my life. It has been a long time coming and it feels great!
I keep a Windows partition around for special cases but I have not had to use it in a long time. Starfeild will probably force me into it for the first time in a long time. The whole Windows experience is insulting to anyone with any self respect. It has not always been this way.
- Even for non-gamers, the magic dust that keeps many Windows games usable on Linux can also be used for non-game Windows apps and everyone can benefit from those compatibility leaps and bounds.
  If you're one of those people who like Linux but still need to have a Windows install to run That One App for work or whatever, WINE/Proton/etc. may be of use to you.
  
  Wine is rarely of much use to anyone.
- Are there still games that just don't run on linux? I messed around with it like 6 years ago but didn't dig too deep, because my main 3 games were the ones that didn't run on linux.
  
  Destiny 2 comes to mind. Bungie has indicated there's 0 interest in making it compatible with Linux ever.
  Usually if it can't run on Linux it's because of kernel level anti-cheat. The vast majority of Steam's library works out of the box with Proton nowadays.
  
  Roblox doesn't run on Linux at the moment because the devs have blocked proton and wine. Which, well, pisses me off because I want to put Linux on my daughter's PC.
  
  Yes, usually games with anti cheat, like Destiny 2. Although it’s way better nowadays, mostly thanks to Valve.
- same here, started using endeavourOS 2 weeks back and haven't looked been. I still need Windows for games with anti cheat like honkai star rail, etc but ever since using Linux as daily driver after years of twiddling my thumbs feels really great and refreshing

This is the best summary I could come up with:
A new update is rolling out for Cortana that simply disables the digital assistant three years after Microsoft also discontinued its Cortana apps for iOS and Android.
If you attempt to launch Cortana on Windows 11 you’ll now be met with a notice about how the app is deprecated and a link to a support article on the change.
It was deeply integrated into the Windows 10 taskbar, with support for voice commands, reminders, and the ability to open applications.
Microsoft then dropped Cortana from the Windows 11 taskbar and first boot experience, but kept the standalone app until this week.
Ultimately, Cortana struggled to compete with rivals like Alexa or Google Assistant, despite a large redesign for iOS and Android.
The fate of Cortana was largely linked to Microsoft’s failures with Windows Phone, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted in 2019 that Cortana had fallen behind competitors.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Clippy 3.0 incoming...

Dig a shallow grave next to Windows Phone, Zune, and IE. C'mon guys, you need to catch up to the size of Google's graveyard.
- RIP Zune. I still have both of mine in my office and they were actually awesome to use.
  
  Do they still work? I hear the collector's market is kinda hot.
  
  You might be the only person I've ever heard of who owned a zune that didn't get stolen. I still miss mine.
- I still have a Lumia 930 in my drawer with WP 8.1. It was such a wonderful OS to use in look and feel. Had Cortana (alpha) on it too.
  
  It was a good OS, there just weren’t enough apps for it.

Still can't uninstall it

Man I'm so out of the loop, I had no idea what Cortana was and thought Windows was finally shutting down all instances of Encarta. (It looks like Encarta did live until around 2008, which does surprise me)

They fail at every attempt to innovate
- That's not true! In the 90s the Sidewinder input devices were sometimes really good! The strategic commander never happened, and I definitely didn't buy it, stop asking!
  But the FF joysticks and the gamepad were really good.
  
  Hahaha holy cow. My dad had a sidewinder joystick. It was called a thrust master or something. Nostalgia.
  
  They made the best wireless mouse I've ever owned under that naming moniker. The SideWinder X8. Big and heavy, which I love. Magnetic charging cable you could use while still using the mouse.
- Have you heard of azure?
  
  There was already an entire cloud market when azure appeared . They just followed the wave . If you are going to give cloud as an example talk me about Oracle or VMware .

Master Chief isn’t going to like this…

Waited until after WAN Show.
Pussies.

Did Cortana consent to this? Maybe she'll find her way back on her own..

Now kill Cortana in Halo 7
- They just killed Halo instead.

Microsoft's "Edge" was Project Spartan at one point wasn't it? Probably would have confused a lot of people if it came out that way but would've been pretty cool.

Such a missed opportunity. I loved Windows Phone and Cortana was good enough at the time but now with Bing AI I wonder what Cortana could really have been.
- They'll shut down their Bing AI too, as soon as they fail to make it an advertising platform. Doesn't matter if customers find it useful, if it cant earn them ad money.
- Oh so you were that one person that liked Windows Phone? Nice to meet you 👋
  
  I also really liked it. Haven't had it myself but my mom did, the UI was great and what killed it was the lack of apps, not because the phones were bad.

Next…Microsoft kills the popups to search with the new Bing AI, and makes it so you do not accidentally bring up their curated news feed that flies in form the left side on Windows 11.

Hey copilot, what is virus.zip that is on my desktop.

Wegen do they shut down windows 11?

"Copilot" aka AI-Manipulation-Brainwash-pilot

65 comments