Hacker News Reader

Comment by zxcvcxz | Hacker News Reader

>will want useful features like Cortana, predictive search, page compatibility modes, allowing websites/apps to ask for her location (e.g. Google Maps), and her files to be backed up when her computer fails.

Have you ever had a grandma? My grandma literally plays solitaire and checks her email, that's it. She wants nothing to do with cortana.

I set my grandma up with Ubuntu and set the homepage of firefox to her email. I've never had a problem.

View on HN

My grandma also mostly plays games and checks her email/Facebook, but she also occasionally has to search the web and has used Siri on her iPad, I don't think Cortana would be that big of a stretch to get her into (e.g. I've seen her use Siri semi-regularly to check the local weather).

To be frank, she would likely be better off with a Chromebook. But unfortunately she has a few games she plays which are Windows binaries (e.g. those $5 CDs containing "2500 card games").

Cortana is no more or no less accessible than Siri.

The problem with Cortona and Siri is that they process everything on remote servers while it could easily be done on a local machine. They do this to be able to save all that data (and take away your privacy).

Apple saves Siri's audio for 2 years for example... not sure what Microsoft's policy is on this...

> The problem with Cortona and Siri is that they process everything on remote servers while it could easily be done on a local machine.

Please enlighten the HN crowd and provide a reference for this claim.

sorry I was thinking mostly about voice recognition... which would already be a big plus if it was done locally.

Are there any existing products comparable in quality and speed to Cortana/Siri that do all of the processing locally?

if they would open source them, then maybe....

... could easily be done on a local machine.

I think you're going to need to provide some evidence to support that. It is not intuitively obvious in the slightest, especially given how frequently Cortana/Siri/GoogleNow trip up even with a data center backing them.

Seriously, if processing locally was so easy but they still wanted to steal all your data, they would crunch it locally & give results, and silently ship off the recording to an archive in parallel. Local processing is cheaper for them (bandwidth, compute) and faster for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com