A first look at Microsoft’s Cortana running on Android | Hacker News Reader

A first look at Microsoft’s Cortana running on Android

arstechnica.com

29 pointsGarbage21 comments

One of the comments is What's with the anthropomorphism? It's weird that you keep calling a piece of software a "she". and I have to say I fully agree: it made the entire article just weird to read?

How on earth is that weird?

Because a piece of software is usually, and grammatically correct as far as English goes, referred to as it

There is nothing grammatical about it in English. In practice gender in British English generally specifies the actual sex of the object, except when the object doesn't have a sex in which case it is merely conventional. Things that are sufficiently important to us are anthopomorphized and this a social and cultural process rather than a strictly grammatical one. Ships are conventionally female in British English, so are cars in some circles, but there is nothing grammatical about it. Similary my wife refers to her Android tablet as he, and he has a name; however the name is ungendered in modern British English while it is a female given name in Ancient Greek.

This is a piece of software, yes, but it is a piece of software portraying a fictional female character. "She" makes perfect sense in this case, not to mention all the other instances where gendered pronouns are used to refer to inanimate objects. I think this complaint is making a mountain out of a molehill.

Cortana comes from the Halo games, where she is an AI, portrayed as a female. I don't find it weird at all. Then again, in my language we must use male or female for things forcefully, so Siri is also female for me.

Addressing an AI as a person makes perfect sense, but Cortana and Sira, the vocal assistants, are not AI.

It has irked me as well for some time. It is smart PR from Apple and Microsoft to present their softs as AIs with personhood but these are 'just' logic trees.

It's a phenomenon we might as well get used to, and I think it has less to do with clever marketing than one might initially think.

What it boils down to is that we will interact with interactive characters as though they were people (and hence with gender, at least in the linguistic sense). It wouldn't make sense to consider a page of search engine results a character, or the alarm screen of your phone. But when software is programmed to respond to general input... well for one thing the authors will surely script some responses (as is the case with Siri and Cortana). And something potentially recognisable as a form of personality would probably just fall out of the quirks of the system. We can quibble over whether (linguistic) gender has meaning here but the software is well within the bounds of anthropomorphism.

It would be fine to follow Greg Egan's usage with ve and vir for virtual personalities. Or to agree that software is a neuter gender even if it has a soft voice and refers to itself as female. But you're not going to convince people that (even quite limited software) with character and a name shouldn't be anthropomorphised.

I'm not sure I see the weirdness. I mean, people refer to Wonder Woman as "she". Is Cortana any less real than Wonder Woman?

> it made the entire article just weird to read?

I realize that would be the case for English speakers... In Spanish doesn't sound that weird because nouns have genres anyway. For instance, in Latin America a computer is a "she"

In portuguese is a he

The Excel Spreadsheet using person that happens to need access to their Office 365 documents through their Android mobile phone could install Cortana to make their busy lives theoretically that bit easier. Other than an imagined use case like this I have no idea why anyone would want this on their phone.

I have a feeling that Cortana et al. will be like Dragon Naturally Speaking, exist as a product for a long time without ever picking up momentum. I don't see people using Siri/Google Now! except for novelty value, I can't imagine people moving from Siri/Google Now! to Cortana at all ever.

I actually use Siri daily, but only to set reminders and turn on alarms, two incredibly trivial use cases.

I'm not opposed to using it more but those are the only things that work reliably for me, I'd get over it disappearing pretty quickly.

I also use Siri to send text messages if I'm driving or riding my bike, or to find the answer to a piece of trivia, or to launch applications, rather than having to hunt for them. That makes quite a lot of use cases, but nevertheless I agree with you that I wouldn't miss Siri if it was to go away

Siri serves 1 billion requests a week, according to Tim Cook. That's about 1000 per second? Could all be novelty attempts, I suppose...

I use Google Now all the time.

The voice search is pretty good, but the travel organisation features are killer. I don't know what I'd do without it.

I use Siri daily to.....

- Send text messages (speaking punctuation like period/question mark helps accuracy, as well as breaking up thoughts by saying dot dot dot) in the car or if Im too lazy to type.

- Telling Siri to play whatever song while driving via Apple Music.

- Directions

- Weather reports

- Setting reminders

Overall I would say 30 to 40 percent of my friends/family use Siri or something similar. As more and more use Siri or Google Now, the accuracy will continue to improve to 100 percent and the percentage of those using will increase. In five to ten years Im guessing the majority will be using their voice assistant.

Actually, Cortana will probably be the break-through that will bring mass adoption to everyone. It is integrated very well in win10, so probably everyone will use it.

I use Siri at least 30-40 times a day, mostly for responding to texts.

I use Cortana all the time now. I've posted here before how it feels like Star Trek, and it impresses me more and more as time goes on.

Example: The other day I said to my phone "Hey Cortana, where are some coffee shops with wifi around here?" And, you know, it worked. It even used the speech synthesis to talk to me. It's eerie having a conversation with the phone like that, using natural language, not even trying anymore to treat it like a computer (e.g. careful phrasing or enunciation).

I seldom open maps by hand anymore, but I ask the phone for driving directions all the time. I never set my own alarms, and for a long time, didn't know how to on this phone.

I don't use all the features Cortana has, like the flight tracking stuff, but I can see getting into the habit with that, too.

It just blows my mind how useful it is, and how little thinking I put into engaging with it as a computer-driven system anymore. Cortana's my first "it just works" experience with a computer, like, ever.

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