"Arrange an appointment for me," or "Remind me to ring Granny this evening," and "Will I need an umbrella tomorrow?" It's not only our smartphones that can answer such questions now. Windows 10 comes with the voice-activated intelligent assistant Cortana on board.
Cortana is named after an artificial intelligence from Microsoft's "Halo" games series. There it controls even spaceships, but its little sibling in Windows is nowhere near as powerful.
Its functionality is similar to that of its Apple rival: "Basically Cortana is an assistant like Siri. I can ask it questions or set it simple tasks," says Jo Bager from German computer magazine c't.
It functions pretty well - with one caveat: "The usefulness depends on how far into the world of the manufacturer I want to go."
For example, anyone working on a Windows 10 PC in the Microsoft ecosystem with its email and scheduling applications can leave a lot of everyday tasks to Cortana.
This isn't yet possible on a Mac computer, but it's possible that Siri will also soon make the jump from mobile devices to the desktop. Linux also has an open-source assistant, but in terms of functionality it's at a very early stage.
Voice-activated assistants don't necessarily speed up work on a PC.
"Voice control is especially attractive when the eyes and hands are busy, for example in a car, or on the tiny screen of a mobile," says Alexander Waibel, professor of computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
"On the classic PC the benefits of such systems are limited, because people are normally sitting with a keyboard and mouse."
Waibel says the assistants would become really useful if the PC became a control centre for the home. For example, you could ask it to look for your favourite TV series.
"With solutions like Amazon Echo that's already there," he says. "It's quite possible that the definition of the PC will go in that general direction in the coming years."
Until then, there are plenty of hurdles to overcome. Perhaps the biggest is the language barrier between assistants and their users.
"To give unique and easy-to-interpret commands is almost impossible for people," Waibel says. "Even the simplest commands are linguistically very complex."
To solve this problem, voice assistants like Siri and Cortana rely on learning algorithms. Commands from every user in the world go into the memory and create a database from which the programmes can learn.
"The more we use these wizards, the better they become," says Waibel.
There are other possibilities for voice control on the PC - it's been possible for years to dictate texts on both Windows and OS X computers. Whether it works better than typing is a matter of taste and practice.
"To dictate clearly and unambiguously without a slip of the tongue is not so easy," says Waibel.
Of course some people are dependent on such systems.
"Speech recognition is very important for all people with some form of motor impairment," says Christian Hille from a Berlin-based association that promotes accessible technologies. "Visually impaired people also use the systems, because they can write more quickly."
The programmes take a bit of getting used to and they work best when they recognise the voice of the owner, Bager says.
The quality of the voice input is also important, so a headset will work significantly better than the basic mic that comes built into laptops.
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