“Microsoft is working on an advanced version of its competitor to Apple’s Siri, using research from an artificial intelligence project called ‘Einstein,'” Bill Rigby reports for Reuters.
MacDailyNews Take: Ooh, “advanced.” Says who? Naming it “Einstein” doesn’t make it a genius and the company spawning it guarantees that it won’t be.
“Microsoft has been running its ‘personal assistant’ Cortana on its Windows phones for a year, and will put the new version on the desktop with the arrival of Windows 10 this autumn,” Rigby reports. “Later, Cortana will be available as a standalone app, usable on phones and tablets powered by Apple Inc’s iOS and Google Inc’s Android, people familiar with the project said.”
MacDailyNews Take: “Einstein.” What an insult to Albert. Microsoft should’ve named the thing “Wendy.”
“Microsoft believes its work on speech recognition, search and machine learning will let it transform its digital assistant into the first intelligent ‘agent’ which anticipates users needs. By comparison, Siri is advertised mostly as responding to requests. Google’s mobile app, which doesn’t have a name like Siri or Cortana, already offers some limited predictive information ‘cards’ based on what it thinks the user wants to know,” Rigby reports. “Microsoft has tried to create digital assistants before, without success. Microsoft Bob, released in 1995, was supposed to make using a computer easy, but ended up being the butt of jokes. The Office Assistant nicknamed ‘Clippy’ suffered a similar fate a few years later.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Pfft. Why run a Siri knockoff when we already have the real thing? Maybe the remaining fragmandroid settlers will download it – if it’s free, of course – just to give their Siri knockoff some company (the two clones can kibitz endlessly about IP theft, we’re sure, and conspire over what they’ll try to steal next from Apple), but for us iOS users, this’ll just be yet another bit of Microsoft superfluousness to ignore.