Is it practical to use Cortana on PC?

By now, Microsoft's voice assistant, Cortana, is already known to everyone: either by having it installed on a Lumia terminal or because it looms timidly in the lower left corner of the Windows 10 for PC taskbar.

"I have already had the opportunity to use Cortana on my Lumia 1520, obtaining a quite satisfactory experience. But honestly, until a few days I had not activated or tested the experience on my Fujitsu laptop with Windows 10. What conclusions can I draw after giving the wizard a few turns? Is it practical to speak to the PC in favor of getting concrete action?"

Managing the basics

The initial setup, which consists of recognizing the microphone and reading a short sentence, took me no more than two minutes . In fact, Windows 10 has warned me that the type of microphone I use, the one built into my laptop, might not be best suited to take advantage of Cortana. Is it so? I haven't actually seen it be a problem.

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The first and essential thing is to activate the option so that, by saying Hello Cortana, the assistant begins to listen and obey our commands voice. The idea is to have the most natural experience possible, and in my opinion, that&39;s what you get. The reaction to our voice is instantaneous and precise."

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What functions and practical aspects can make Cortana a good voice assistant in our work with a PC? I&39;ve found it particularly useful being able to set alarms and reminders in less than 2 minutes.When one is in front of the computer all day, and has to remember something important, it is great to be able to quickly write down what one cannot ignore or what one has to do in hours or minutes. I think it&39;s easy to miss a piece of paper or post-it."

How about turning Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity on or off with a simple voice command? Cortana responds perfectly. On the other hand, although it can be done with the voice assistant, it will be more practical to manually open the file explorer and the device settings area.

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And find a file on disk? There Cortana can be a good tool, especially if you forgot the exact path of the document. How do you get search effectiveness? For that it will be necessary to use a keyword, otherwise there will be no satisfactory result.It&39;s proven. The command will be as simple as saying, for example, find plan file: the results will show all files that contain plan in the name."

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Other things one can do using Microsoft&39;s voice assistant is perform searches on web pages, although I would have preferred to get them from the Google search engine before using BING. In general I have no complaints about the recognition of words and the presentation of the results, although some adjustments would be needed so that when linking words as Lumia 1520 images, Bing image-specific results would be displayed: same for videos, maps or news. This detail needs to be polished."

Of course, knowing the weather today, tomorrow or five days ahead is also effective, as well as knowing the state of traffic in our current location. They are those small details that, at a given moment, one may be interested in knowing.

Opening apps with Cortana

Another of Cortana's practical functions will consist of opening the applications installed on our PC, with total freedom and without any type of limitation . Everything goes on wheels. In fact, if we had two applications with the same name, the wizard would indicate it to us and then there would be no more to choose from.

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How will our instructions respond if we want to define routes to a specific postal address? Here I have obtained a bittersweet response, since on some occasions the exact route to the required address has been represented, although on others undesired results have been offered: for example, going to the same street but to a different city or town. Is it worth using this functionality? I don&39;t think so, but I recommend saying the command open maps>"

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On the other hand, using voice commands to launch Groove Musica and play a specific album from those stored on the PC will turn out to be somewhat quite handy. Even if we prefer, we can indicate that an artist&39;s content be played. Sometimes, for English titles, it can help if you pronounce it as it&39;s spelled. Do you want to pause>" "

With Cortana you can also start new email messages, in which we only have to indicate the recipient and the body of the message , and finally send. The title of the message, by default, will be Quick Message. Will it always be useful? It is more convenient for when we want to send a few words, otherwise I find it better to start the mail application (even with voice command) and compose the text with the computer keyboard."

Cortana is a must-have extra

Can I say that Cortana, at least on the PC, is a must-have tool? At least today it is not, although we do not rule it out for the future.It is true that, after playing the wizard and seeing what can or cannot be done, one ends up getting used to actions as simple as playing music, adding reminders, carrying out an Internet search or carrying out occasional document searches. .

There are details that can be improved, such as the fact that the assistant recognizes an email address when spelling it, that searches are not only limited to BING or that new documents can be created with Office applications . Although if you think about it, it is a matter of time before Cortana improves its capabilities.