Читать книгу Windows 10 All-in-One For Dummies - Ciprian Adrian Rusen, Woody Leonhard - Страница 52

Apple has Siri. Google has Google Assistant. Amazon has Alexa. Microsoft has Cortana, the Redmond version of an AI-based personal assistant, shown in Figure 2-5. Unlike Siri and Google Assistant, though, Cortana used to take over the Windows 10 search function, so it had a larger potential footprint than its AI cousins.

Cortana never took off, and it was used a lot less than Siri or Google Assistant. Because of that, Microsoft decided to decouple it from the rest of Windows 10, and as of the May 2020 update, it is a separate entity. It no longer takes over Windows 10’s search, and you can ignore it if you want. However, if you do enable it, it sits in the background, listening for your commands.

I tell you much more about Cortana in this book — she has a chapter all to herself, Book 3, Chapter 5 — but I’ll drop a little tidbit here, tailored for those Windows XP fans among you who may just be a bit intimidated by a talking helper-droid.

You see, Cortana has a history.

FIGURE 2-5: Cortana sits, listening, and watching, waiting to help you. That should either make you skeptical or scared — or a little of both.

Back in 2001, Microsoft released a game called Halo: Combat Evolved. In Halo: CE, you, the player, take the role of the Master Chief, a kinda-human kinda-cyber soldier known as Master Chief Petty Officer John-117. Cortana is part of you, an artificial intelligence that’s built into a neural implant in your body armor. After saving Captain Keyes, Cortana and the Master Chief go into a map room called the Silent Cartographer, and … well, you get the idea. Cortana is smooth and creepy and omniscient, just like the Windows 10 character.

Right now, depending on how you measure, Cortana is likely the least intelligent of the assistants, with Google Assistant on top, and Siri and Alexa vying for second place. That may change over time. In fact, someday Cortana may scan this paragraph and call me to task for my impertinence — bad blot on my record, served up to our robotic overlords.