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Comment by sudioStudio64 | Hacker News Reader

But the entire point of the service was to use data mining techniques so that you could use natural language directives to say "add a reminder to my team's calendar to update some presentation in O365, etc"...

Maybe you don't find it that useful, but I think that a lot of people would. It will, in a future release, be genuinely useful. It's getting there.

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All of which could be done locally. There's certainly no shortage of processing power available to do so. All of those services have APIs.

That's actually how it works. You give it permission to use your O365 account. You give it permission to use your location either at setup or in the config settings at a later date.

A whole host of the Cortana functionality is local that interacts with online services via API's that you authorize.

I don't think that really anything that I say is going to change your mind, but you could check out some of the video's on Channel9 where they go into it in detail. Some of it's pretty good and if you use headphones you can't hear your co-workers talk about stuff that makes you want to slap someone.

The claim that started this thread was that Cortana needed this data to be supplied to Microsoft, as controlled by the privacy settings mentioned in the linked article. If Cortana or similar services don't actually need this data, great; then they shouldn't ask for it or need to have privacy settings that allow it to be sent to Microsoft.

Josh, maybe you don't get how difficult Speech Recognition is now that it comes as standard in your smartphone, but they use Google/Apple (delete as appropriate) servers for a reason. There's a reason people were amazed at the response time of Cortana - local speech recognition that doesn't hog the processor is a big deal.

And connecting to O365 calendars offline? Is that not a stupid concept?

Last time I checked, and it was few years ago, analyzing voice locally was much faster than what phones do today - because well, mobile networks have latency. The round-trip to cloud and back itself can easily take a second.

I'm well aware of how phones handle speech recognition; there are reasons they do so via services that have little to do with the computational difficulty of speech recognition. It's not by any means necessary to upload raw voice data to a server and process it there, especially if we're talking about full computers rather than just phones.

> And connecting to O365 calendars offline? Is that not a stupid concept?

I said "local", not "offline". Though in any case, you should likely have a locally synced cache of your calendar for efficiency and the ability to read it offline. Web apps are quite capable of working while offline.

> we're talking about full computers

Worth mentioning: Windows 10 is not just for "full computers."

I'm aware, but the line is becoming increasingly blurred, and there's enough power on even the average phone to do speech recognition.

> And connecting to O365 calendars offline? Is that not a stupid concept?

Did we enter a new era where using your calendar offline is considered a special case ? I would assume there are few people who actively modify the same calendar, and it's pretty easy to tell a user when they modify a calendar offline meaning that it's not synchronized on other devices; is there really a need for making calendars online first ?

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