Daggy Cortana humour is shoddy Windows dressing

The new, Australianised version of Microsoft’s voice assistant will need to lift its game.

Somewhere in a quiet, padded dungeon at Microsoft headquarters, a now barely sane employee has spent months unwrapping the Christmas bonbon jokes from the past 10 years, and typing them into the database of the Cortana personal assistant.

How else do you explain the corny humour in the new, Australianised version of Cortana that was unleashed on Windows 10 desktops and tablets, courtesy of a system update on November 13?

Humour such as: “How do you stop a dingo from charging you? Take away his credit card” and “How do kangaroos stay positive? They hop for the best.”

It’s what Aussie Cortana offers when you ask it for a joke. She’ll also sing you an Australian song or a lullaby. Her round of animal jokes brought back childhood memories. I’d heard some of these decades ago. But it was all enough to temper my enthusiasm.

Microsoft's Cortana PA tells jokes.

If you have Windows 10, Cortana is the slowly pulsating circle in a column on the left side of the Windows menu that replaces the standard search box.

You can still type a search query, but if you press the little microphone, or speak to Cortana, she stirs into action.

The jokes are not a manifestation of artificial intelligence. By and large computers are yet to understand complex humour, which in turn means understanding ingredients like irony, sarcasm, culture, language and accumulated human experience. The exception seems to be puns, which are more narrowly language-focused. It’s a case of Cortana regurgitating a jokes database.

Hopefully its jokes and quotes aren’t the sum total of Microsoft’s efforts to deliver on its mission statement, that in Australia Cortana will celebrate the nation’s rich culture, history and people. That includes “indigenous legends, rugged bushrangers and sports stars”.

Another Cortana joke.

If Microsoft’s celebration of Australian culture is embodied by jokes beginning “why did the cockatoo sit on the clock”, I’m speechless. This is shoddy window dressing, compared to what personal assistants offer modern computing and where real AI takes off.

Using your voice, you can tell Cortana to set calendar entries, reminders and alarms, and send emails and text messages, although Cortana would not let me complete dictating a text message before wanting to send it. There were inaccuracies in it, too. Such impatience!

You can search files using natural language queries, such as “find me documents about tax”. She’ll play your music from A to Z, but I found it hard to control the artist and song that plays.

To help improve accuracy, Cortana has a notebook where you set up your name, home, work and other addresses, stocks you want to track, and news and weather preferences. It’s a great idea and it should extend to including a dictionary where you add difficulty pronounced words or corrections of expressions she often gets wrong.

Cortana sings Australian songs, while showing the lyrics.

I especially enjoyed the reminders, which can be triggered at a particular time, place, or when you communicate with a particular person. You can remind yourself to ask a friend a favour the next time they contact you.

Cortana, and its counterparts — Apple’s Siri and Google Now — are the future of computing. Sooner or later, we will ditch the keyboard and mouse, and rely on touch screens and speech when interacting with machines.

While Cortana is good at maths, converting currencies and even translating phrases, my major annoyance is with the general knowledge questions. She makes no effort to distil a distinct answer. She just shoves your question into a Bing browser and that’s it.

Despite its purported cultural awareness of Australia, she doesn’t know who Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten are. Same goes for rugged bushrangers and sports stars, with Ned Kelly, Don Bradman, and Phar Lap failing to make an impression. Instead, Cortana took my query and made it the subject of a Bing browser search. That’s all.

Cortana translates phrases.

As for its knowledge of US politicians, Cortana knows who Barack Obama is but couldn’t tell me about Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and even JFK. Even for Microsoft icons Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella, their names were bunged into Bing and that was that. In contrast, Apple’s Siri mostly throws up the specific Wikipedia entry of the person and even Google gives you more details about Microsoft’s founder than Microsoft.

The software giant seems to take a view that there are more important uses of Cortana than serving up general knowledge answers but Cortana also doesn’t dissemble your queries. So if I ask: “Tell me about restaurants in Newtown”, she uses the entire phrase as the query, rather than “restaurants in Newtown”.

Microsoft regards Cortana’s main role as a PA and it does a reasonable job at that. Cortana’s humour is more miss than hit, although you can see that Microsoft has put some work into it. But overall it’s a shame to see silly jokes take precedence over real knowledge.

Information fed back to a user by Cortana.

Apple and Google meanwhile have been updating their PAs. Siri now searches through photos, offers contextual and location based reminders, and intelligent suggestions as to what you might want to do next.

Google Now takes contextual queries. So if I ask: “What’s the temperature in Sydney” and then say: “What about Melbourne?”, it knows I mean the temperature there. There’s also Now on Tap. A long press of the home button brings up contextual specific information about your current action.

It’s early days. Microsoft believes Bing will be smarter in time as it learns from Cortana’s encounters around the globe. It says that in time Cortana will offer more precise answers. It says a Windows Phone version of Cortana will be released on December 7, and that Cortana will be available as an iOS and Android app. Neither are in the Australian app stores yet.

Rating: 5/10
Available with Windows 10, and shortly, Windows Phone

Cortana: the verdict.