Cortana was quite amazing. Her voice was so authentic, so real sounding, but unlike Siri, she actually felt like an assistant to get things done. One could simply say,"Hey Cortana!" and a dinging chime would sound, signalling she was listening for questions and commands. Dubbed the "first personal digital assistant", her main competitiveness in the voice recognition marketplace came in that she was more personal, able to tell jokes and be productive at the same time with a smooth synthesized voice.
Some of her best features included location reminders (say,"Remind me when I leave Walmart where I parked", or "Remind me next time I'm at school to return my library book."), telling cheesy jokes (no explanation needed), reading text messages aloud, sending texts, calling people, and most importantly and impressively, using APIs. APIs, or Application Program Interfaces, allows one app to interact with another. Using APIs, Cortana is able to interact with apps outside of Microsoft's home ecosystem, so that the user can tell Cortana,"Play episode 3 season 10 of South Park on Netflix," or,"Play my Watch Later on YouTube," or,"Play Radioactive on Spotify," and Cortana can open each individual app, search for the content from that app, and play it, all without the user having to click a button.
This is where Cortana and Google Now have always beaten out Siri at its game. iOS and Apple have always struggled to accept applications being able to extend their reaches outside their own virtual sandboxes, and thus, Siri has never had much interaction with the user and its apps outside of Apple's built in apps. For example, I could tell Siri to set a 5 am alarm, and it would create an alarm for 5 am using the BUILT IN clock app. However, if I tell it to play the latest PewDiePie video on YouTube, it will simply tell me its confused, or Google "Latest PewdiePie video on YouTube", creating frustration with the user. This is why Cortana earned its name as a personal assistant. However, recently Microsoft has created a beta app of Cortana for Android, but interestingly enough, has now also created a beta app for iOS as of this week.
The idea behind the release of the voice client on Android and iOS is to convince these users that Cortana is amazing by giving them a teasing taste, and convince them to switch mobile platforms to Windows Mobile, now currently Windows 10.
While the idea sounds great on paper, I consider it a waste of resources, time, and money. It's not convincing anyone to switch. As bold as that statement may sound, I believe it to be true. On both Android and iOS, the app is crippled beyond belief from what I had on my old Windows Phone. As I explained earlier, Cortana is so useful on Windows Mobile due to the incorporation of APIs on the OS, allowing it to interact with apps such as Spotify or Netflix directly. However, once Cortana reached 3rd party platforms, it no longer retains control over APIs and other applications. Without such integration, Cortana can only place calls, tell jokes, and Bing things for the most part. So while I applaud Microsoft’s efforts at expansion and unifying platforms, I think they should save their time, as it does nothing but misrepresent how useful Cortana is.
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