Cortana

[Total Noob]

Anybody getting any benefit from Cortana?

My HP Elite Book badgered me for weeks for a Win10 update, and I finally conceded to it because I was home and had no other need for the computer at that moment.

After several hours of loading, booting, shutting down and rebooting, the major change seems to have been the unsolicited introduction of Cortana onto my taskbar. I had not tried it before.

I Googled up Cortana, and discovered its useful functionality is limited to a few categories of voice activated searches on Bing and voice created reminders, which I guess is some kind of alarm system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana Other features seemed trivial at best. You are not dictating your term paper or regular correspondence with it.

1. It takes me longer to speak than to write, and Bing searches are pretty crappy anyway. My wife can't use it; she is not a native English speaker and no voice system I have come across understands speech that is accented or uses less than perfect grammar. So even that is useless.

2. I use a calendar and diary to remember stuff like appointments. I do not need Microsoft reminders to go to the doctor or my cousin's wedding (facts they will happily resell to any bidder).

Was billions of dollars spent on this useless, if not counterproductive, crap? Why was my computer tied up for hours -- and why were other people's computers that might have been on battery or been in use at Starbucks tied up with hours long updates that might have fouled up the users' schedules?

Did anybody find some other benefit from Cortana?

TY.

[renegade600]

I have it disable. use alexa instead. at this time, I think any ai will have problems with accents, speech impediments, background noise and more.

[CyberTrek]

I never used it. Nor Alexa or anything.