Cortana Now Reminds You To Do the Things You Promised in Emails (theverge.com) 134
From a report: Microsoft is adding a new feature to Cortana today that will remind you to keep your promises. Suggested reminders lets Cortana remind you when you've promised to do something in an email. Microsoft is using machine learning to highlight phrases in emails where you might promise your boss something, or make a commitment to a friend or family member. The result is a reminder that pops up telling you "don't forget you mentioned this." Cortana's suggested reminders will be available in the US first on Windows 10 PCs, and Microsoft is planning to bring them to iOS and Android in the coming weeks. Microsoft is supporting Outlook.com and Office 365 accounts for these reminders, and other accounts like Gmail will be supported soon. You'll need to connect an Outlook.com or Office 365 account to Cortana to enable the feature, and you'll start receiving reminders once the service detects your promises and commitments.
Remind me (Score:5, Insightful)
Remind me to disable Cortana
Re:Remind me (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like personal assistants are nothing more than intrusive nag machines that want access to every aspect of my life.
It's bad enough that I have an ongoing battle to get relevant notifications on my device from normal apps.
The last thing I need is another app nagging me to do stuff. If I promised to do something, I will do it. Which, by the way, is why I rarely promise to do anything...
Re:Remind me (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like personal assistants are nothing more than intrusive nag machines that want access to every aspect of my life.
You mean like a wife or girlfriend?
Re:Remind me (Score:5, Insightful)
Cortana doesn't compensate you with sex.
Re:Remind me (Score:5, Funny)
Cortana doesn't compensate you with sex.
Neither does a wife.
Re: Remind me (Score:3)
Yeah, but at least a wife beaks down and does it herself after nagging for hours. Husbands know how much nagging has to be endured before those dishes wash themselves. If Cortana is so smart, why doesn't she just do it herself.
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Well, that's what the girlfriend is for!!!
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Has anyone checked what Cortana does when it detects another personal assistant running?
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If it's anything like MS's plan for Steam, then it'll make the other assistant run worse and worse over time so that you use Cortana primarily.
http://www.pcgamer.com/tim-sweeney-thinks-microsoft-will-make-steam-progressively-worse-with-windows-10-patches/
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Coming soon from Microsoft: there's a robot for that.
Think of the telemetry they'd send back (Score:2)
> Coming soon from Microsoft: there's a robot for that.
MS could blackmail millions of people.
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Cortana doesn't compensate you with sex.
But now she will nag you to get back to the Thai escort spam emails you have been getting. She will also keep reminding you to make your mortgage larger.
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It seems like personal assistants are nothing more than intrusive nag machines that want access to every aspect of my life.
You mean like a wife or girlfriend?
Not every wife or girlfriend, ones like that are called bitches.
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Never had a real personal assistant then :)
I've tried out Cortana a few times on the crappy Win10 tablet I got free with my Dell notebook. It mainly just sends me to Bing, so I've largely deemed it useless. I suppose I could use it for scheduling, but I find speaking commands to software to be slower and more error prone than even tapping it out on a touch keyboard that I largely ignore Cortana.
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It seems like personal assistants are nothing more than intrusive nag machines that want access to every aspect of my life.
You can say that again. They started life being pretty much useless. They are now becoming worse than useless.
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We already suffer from enough stress in our work. If you don't have time to do what you promised then you will get stressed even more when you get the computer nagging you about it.
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I may well be alone in this, but I think this actually sounds like a good idea. I really could do with a personal assistant that knows every detail of every email I've ever written or received and can tell me to do stuff in emails that are 'below the fold' that I've forgotten about.
What I don't want is all that happening on someone else's server. If it could all happen on my computer without need to send every last detail to 'the cloud' then I'd genuinely be interested. Until then, I'll keep using my (Siri-
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Can you do this anymore?
Not officially.
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Yes. You can use gpedit or if you have Windows 10 home, you can enter key the template would place in the registry.
Click here [ghacks.net] for instructions.
Scroll down to the heading Does that mean that you cannot turn of Cortana anymore? The instructions for gpedit and registry disable of Cortana are listed below.
Re:Remind me (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm afraid I can't do that Dave..
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Damn it! You beat me!
Re:Remind me (Score:4, Funny)
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Remind me to disable Cortana
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I cant do that.
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You should be modded down for such a transgression; not only do you acknowledge that someone beat you to the phrase but you repeated it, this isn't reddit dude...THIS! IS! SLASHDOT!
I didn't see theirs until I hit refresh and saw it was above me. (my quote is accurate though).
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No kidding. I was just thinking of when people get told "I'll do it later" just to get them out of your face. ;-)
Microsoft LIED. (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft kept telling everyone that only Google reads your email [wikipedia.org], and they don't. Now they're admitting that Cortana will read your email without your permission!
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It's different! Google parses your e-mail in order to profile you for advertising. Cortana parses your e-mail in order to remind you that you're a lying procrastinator that has no intention of following through on anything. :P
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Now they're admitting that Cortana will read your email without your permission!
From TFS:
You'll need to connect an Outlook.com or Office 365 account to Cortana to enable the feature, ...
Maybe Cortana can remind you to learn how to read.
I got this. (Score:2)
Disable Cortana.
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I'll bet she'll still be active and silently reading your email.
I'll bet they're doing this at the server, not the (Score:2)
It's not easy (Score:2)
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Nag-A-Tron 5000 (Score:3, Insightful)
Mmm yummy a program that reads my mail and will chase me down for shit
Where do I sign up for this abuse? (oh yeah I installed Windows 10 abuse is complimentary)
Wont last (Score:4, Interesting)
Important things wont get done if you get reminded all the time to go back and fix all the perfect world problems that you promised yourself you'd do. Unfortunately life gets in the way and the important things quickly take priority. Being reminded to go and correct the whitespace in a random header file isn't going to help anyone.
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Promising something is the easy way to get an annoying asshole out of your hair.
But isn't a machine scanning your email bad? (Score:2)
Isn't this how Microsoft tried to bash Google, because they matched keywords in emails to ads?
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You've been Microscraped? Microscrewed? Microscorned?
Yeah... not quite as catchy as Scroogled.
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Its the new micro-nagging economy. Every time you press the "fuck you" button to shut her up, you pay Microsoft 1 cent.
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Corporations are like political factions. It's always OK when we do it, it's those other guys doing it that's bad!
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President Trump, this is just a reminder that you promised to "LOCK HER UP!"
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't send that. (Score:1)
Cortana will accomplish the mission despite you endangering it.
Is the scan done client-side or server-side? (Score:4, Interesting)
Then again, if Google can do exactly the same thing to improve the accuracy of targeted advertising I suppose this is relatively innocuous. Still, can I meaningfully out out of should I just make sure GPG/PGP is installed and working correctly? After all, the OS itself does a couple dozen phone-homes, why should web services be any different?
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You have no privacy. Get over it and love Big Brother.
You Promised to Kill... (Score:1)
I can't wait until Cortana reminds someone to carry out their death threat...
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And then it broadcasts the reminders on all of your devices.
Fun times.
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Hey! I see your drafts folder contains an unfinished death threat to your boss! Proximity sensor indicates your boss just walked in! Why not have that conversation in person instead!
gpedit to disable Cortana (Score:3)
It is still possible to disable Cortana in any version of Windows 10.
Go to http://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/... [ghacks.net] and scroll down to Does that mean that you cannot turn of Cortana anymore? and you will find instructions to activate the GP template or enter the registry key directly into regedit.
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HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search
AllowCortana
REG_DWORD
0
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> "Please note that the Group Policy Editor is only available in professional versions of Windows 10. Most notably, it is not available in Windows 10 Home."
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*ding* Cortana reminder: Don't forget your appointment with Todd today (Friday) to rip your fucking nuts off and feed them to your children.
Big Sis is watching. (Score:1)
I suppose Microsoft thought they were smart calling it "Cortana" rather than "Big Brother", but it definitely seems headed the same way. What's next, will she start "fixing" your outgoing emails and snooping on the incoming ones according to what the party line is for the moment, and fire of a message to HR or some three letter agency if anything suspicious turns up?
"Machine Learning" (Score:3)
I love how "Machine Learning" is basically the new hit buzzword (phrase) of 2017. Everything is now "WITH MACHINE LEARNING!" - which is really usually just a static algorithm that searches for generic key words. If you use Facebook, you've probably already seen this in where they highlight words representing time or dates and if you click on them it'll generate a calendar item for you. Microsoft is literally just doing the same, only without the asking part now, but labeling it "Machine Learning" and calling it "OMGZ INNOVATION!"
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Corn Flakes! Now with 20% more boring MACHINE LEARNING (and NO toy) in every box!
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OMGZ INNOVATION
As much as I hate buzzwords I can't help but notice everything seems to automatically get better as I use it. Recommended news is more relevant to my interests, handwriting recognition in Windows is getting better (and by all accounts my handwriting is going the opposite direction), and what started off as basic times and dates is being picked up every more generically with words like soon, tomorrow, before the end of the week, etc.
If this buzzword is driving this than tac it on where you want.
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you've probably already seen this in where they highlight words representing time or dates and if you click on them
If you go to the English Language edition of People's Daily (nice easy to type in URL, en.people.cn [people.cn] ) a floating box at the bottom left sits there and the webpage brings up floating dialogues with Chinese translations of the word you hover over. The translation service, BTW, says it's from Bing.
Re: "Machine Learning" is for niggers (Score:1)
Look ma' another idiot! There must be a nest here somewhere...
Mi6ro6of6 wants your soul (Score:2, Insightful)
Headline should be changed... (Score:2, Insightful)
Needs to read, "Cortana now reads all of your emails".
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Possible revision: "Cortana now admits to reading all of your emails."
Creepy (Score:1)
If this is purely local and I can turn it off, that's fine.
If it's cloud-based, it better be encrypted in a way that only I can decrypt it.
If I can't turn it off, well, read Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Failed to disable Cortana when asked (Score:1)
Seriously, how do I shut down this nanny state product?
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Digital lobotomy in action (Score:2)
If only cortana could remind itself to never show up again...
Microsoft: "Google reads all your emails" (Score:1)
Anyone remember this from 4 years ago? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec... [telegraph.co.uk]
I'd say this was fair game for Google :)
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The Microsoft questions (Score:3)
1. "Can it be disabled?"
2. "How much longer are we going to be able to disable it?"
3. "What will break in the process of this being disabled that I actually DO want from the system?"
These are honestly the 3 questions I have been asking EVERY SINGLE TIME Microsoft announced any new "feature" for an OS in the past 3 years. There was not a single instance of "hey, I've been waiting for that!" or "Now that's a good idea".
Not
a
single
one
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It will be possible to disable it. But each time Windows Update is run, it is possible it will be re-enabled.
It is not possible to disable Windows Update.
And then... (Score:2)
And then tells Microsoft when you've done it.
Wow, doing what Google did a year ago. (Score:2)
I am amazed.
Let Me Guess (Score:2)
Let me guess. The AI that performs the processing to create the reminders regarding promises you made in your emails is very powerful and smart. So smart that all your emails are transferred off and processed on a Powerful Cloud Computer that Microsoft is generous to provide gratis, free of charge!
Fear... (Score:1)