Nov 19 2019 09:39 AM
Hello Insiders! You have told us that you really want the Ask Cortana / Ask Bing feature in our next version of Microsoft Edge.
In the current version of Microsoft Edge, you can select text or click on an image and get a result from Cortana / Bing in a side panel, without leaving the page you are browsing.
We hear you and from your feedback we understand you would like similar contextual search functionality in a way that does not pull you out of your browsing flow.
We are investigating our ability to add this to the next version of Microsoft Edge and we would like to understand what makes this feature useful for you.
How did you use this feature? If you ever attempted to use Ask Cortana / Ask Bing and couldn’t get the answer you were looking for, what steps did you take, if any, to get the answer you were looking for?
What aspects of the Ask Cortana experience do you like or appreciate? What improvements would you like to see?
Please let us know, either in the comments below or by using the Send-A-Smile feedback.
Thanks – Jared Brown and the Microsoft Edge Search Team
Feb 28 2020 03:06 AM
In fact here is another revolutionary and controversial idea:
Outside our developer community, Bing doesnt really feature as a search engine - everyone knows Google - its been verbed. Folk who haven't played Halo, or had a dinosaur phone (Lumia) have never heard of Cortana.
So, rename / splice "Bing" to Cortana - one unified search engine / AI, big marketing push, use some of the Cortana renders from the various Halo movielets - "Forward unto dawn" etc. Combine them with Donovan Brown's ads for Microsoft AI, walking round ancient ruins / on safari with Cortana on one shoulder acting as guide.
Hey I should be in Marketing. I need to check my meds.
Feb 28 2020 04:28 AM
@LegacyOfherot wrote:In fact here is another revolutionary and controversial idea:
Outside our developer community, Bing doesnt really feature as a search engine - everyone knows Google - its been verbed. Folk who haven't played Halo, or had a dinosaur phone (Lumia) have never heard of Cortana.
So, rename / splice "Bing" to Cortana - one unified search engine / AI, big marketing push, use some of the Cortana renders from the various Halo movielets - "Forward unto dawn" etc. Combine them with Donovan Brown's ads for Microsoft AI, walking round ancient ruins / on safari with Cortana on one shoulder acting as guide.
Hey I should be in Marketing. I need to check my meds.
more than 1 Billions people are using Windows 10, so Cortana is not unknown.
MSN,Live,Bing, all 3 words have been integrated in each other for years.
the difference is that google adds their prefix "google" to almost all of their products. google keep, google asssistance, google hangout, google whatever.
Microsoft has different style. "Word" , "OneNote" , "Skype" , "Bing" , "Cortana".
there is no problem with that. google thinks if they don't shove word "google" into everyone's throat, it means they lose.
Feb 28 2020 05:35 AM
@HotCakeX , I said this was controversial. I agree there are a lot of Windows 10 machines out there (and a large number of older versions too, Win 7 refuses to go quietly into the night).
If you watch the news, whenever they talk about personal assistants, they quote Siri and Alexa.
Whenever they mention searching the interweb - its "I Googled for it".
Walk into a bar and ask anyone over 40 about Cortana, you'll get a blank look - as for explaining the difference between asking Bing and asking Cortana - I'm not sure I could.
My pitch was that Microsoft don't have a clear message, and I think having one point of interaction - Cortana - would be simpler, and a great marketing meme - "Ask Cortana" - you needn't just get get a list of vaguely relevant web sites, complete with their GDPR "You cant do anything useful here unless you allow our cookies", She might actually give useful facts and figures.
On my Win 10 desktop - I click on the Cortana button and say "Tell me about the Tower of London". I get a link to the ToL's web site, a wikipedia entry, some other places to visit. I want her to TELL ME ABOUT the tower.
If I'm there (She knows I'm there because I have to have Location services turned on) She could tell me when it was built, and as I walk around, look through the camera on the Surface (not on my Lumia, obviously) and tell me about the various buildings. "Cortana, where is the bar?" and a map comes up.
BTW I hate Google too - In my view they are the new Evil Empire. I'm forming the Rebel Alliance. Come to the light side, we have cookies.
Feb 28 2020 09:10 AM
Mar 01 2020 10:40 PM
@Elliot KirkI use both 'Search the web for' and 'ask Cortana about' all the time
I use ask Cortana when I need a quick definition or extra info about something without leaving the page, when the quck info will be enough and I don't need to explore further, for info about where an image comes from or as a quick way of seeing an image full size in its own tab.
I use 'search the web for' when I want to explore a topic in more depth and expect to open multiple links and go to multiple page and so want a persistent list of search results
Mar 02 2020 02:48 AM
@HotCakeX Thank you for clarifying that. As I said, we, as developers, can discuss the nuances of a user interface till the cows come home.
The other 900,000,000 users of Windows 10 are not quite so knowledgeable.
PCs are no longer the default for most people, they / we use phones, tablets, other devices. I 'tooth my phone to the car, and if I receive a text message, Cortana asks if I'd like to reply, I say "Yes" and she turns the music back on. She used to respond to my voice commands, but now, I have to stop and get the phone out of my pocket.
On my Desktop, I asked Cortana "Tell me about the Tower of London", she gave me this - looks like she asked Bing on my behalf:
I opened a browser window and entered "Tower of London" in Bing, and got this:
Neither of which is exactly what I wanted. My Encarta CD has quite a lot of information on the Tower, original content, owned by MS - no copyright issues!
Walking around Hampstead, there are some fascinating buildings, some owned by the National Trust. It would be really cool to have Cortana tell me about the area AND inside the buildings, no button pushes or opening browser windows. Just a foot-tall AI sitting on my right shoulder talking through my earpiece. Speak to the NT down in Swindon, Wiltshire UK, they are very IT savvy.
Back in 2015, some Microsoft guys had a device on show at Future Decoded, intended for blind people to wear on the head. (Just a 3D printed prototype).
It sensed direction with a small flux gate magnetometer, and toothed to an app running on a Lumia 950. The app had a haptic user interface - as the user dragged down a list, the phone vibrated simulating a resistance to scrolling, like notches. As far as I know it went no further, but now Microsoft do have an app for fruity phones to provide street guidance for blind people. I can't remember what they call it - more forgettable marketing from Redmond. If someone has an iPhone, maybe they could ask Siri?
My point is: this forum is about interfacing Bing / Cortana to Edge, but we need to remember Edge is just a UI - one of many - the UI is not the application.
Mar 02 2020 03:15 AM
@LegacyOfherot wrote:@HotCakeX Thank you for clarifying that. As I said, we, as developers, can discuss the nuances of a user interface till the cows come home.
The other 900,000,000 users of Windows 10 are not quite so knowledgeable.
PCs are no longer the default for most people, they / we use phones, tablets, other devices. I 'tooth my phone to the car, and if I receive a text message, Cortana asks if I'd like to reply, I say "Yes" and she turns the music back on. She used to respond to my voice commands, but now, I have to stop and get the phone out of my pocket.
On my Desktop, I asked Cortana "Tell me about the Tower of London", she gave me this - looks like she asked Bing on my behalf:
I opened a browser window and entered "Tower of London" in Bing, and got this:
Neither of which is exactly what I wanted. My Encarta CD has quite a lot of information on the Tower, original content, owned by MS - no copyright issues!
Walking around Hampstead, there are some fascinating buildings, some owned by the National Trust. It would be really cool to have Cortana tell me about the area AND inside the buildings, no button pushes or opening browser windows. Just a foot-tall AI sitting on my right shoulder talking through my earpiece. Speak to the NT down in Swindon, Wiltshire UK, they are very IT savvy.
Back in 2015, some Microsoft guys had a device on show at Future Decoded, intended for blind people to wear on the head. (Just a 3D printed prototype).
It sensed direction with a small flux gate magnetometer, and toothed to an app running on a Lumia 950. The app had a haptic user interface - as the user dragged down a list, the phone vibrated simulating a resistance to scrolling, like notches. As far as I know it went no further, but now Microsoft do have an app for fruity phones to provide street guidance for blind people. I can't remember what they call it - more forgettable marketing from Redmond. If someone has an iPhone, maybe they could ask Siri?
My point is: this forum is about interfacing Bing / Cortana to Edge, but we need to remember Edge is just a UI - one of many - the UI is not the application.
if you're a developer then how can you say Edge is just a UI...
Edge is a full application, a browser.
it has a UI obviously but the code behind it is even more important (the framework it's built on, the engine etc).
I don't think that number is correct, it's just your personal opinion about Windows 10 users being educated or knowledgeable or not.
Microsoft clearly showed us that they intend to make Cortana only useful for businesses and enterprises with integration to Office/Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
Mar 02 2020 03:24 AM
Mar 02 2020 05:41 AM
@HotCakeX wrote:
Edge uses the same rendering and Java script engine as Chrome, for the UI i think it uses HTML/JS/CSS too
Microsoft could've wrapped the actual code in XAML language and create a UWP UI for the Edge browser which would look great on Windows 10.
+++++
Mar 02 2020 06:28 AM
Sigh.. one last try, then I'll go away.
I'm not talking about MVC / MVVM /separation of concerns. I'm saying we should consider how Bing/Cortana work in the bigger picture. The physical UI in Edge is ok for users with a screen and keyboard/mouse/finger, could use some work as discussed here.
I was trying to point out that not all devices have those things: if I have a brick on my nose (Hololens/Samsung gear/Occulus/Sony thing) then selecting some text to get quick help doesn't really scan.
If I'm in my car I'd like to be able to tell Cortana to email/text someone, send a meeting request, set a reminder, find a restaurant / pub nearby. I can ask Frau Audi to call them, but her skills are limited, I must ask the right questions.
Microsoft abandoned their Band users, so that's no longer an issue.
Windows phone... uh huh.
Some of us bought Kinects, both for PC and XBox. I'm really not sure how I would differentiate between Bing and Cortana on XBox. I mean XBone - they abandoned XBox 360 users a while back.
That's my 2 pennies @Elliot Kirk I'm outa here.
Mar 03 2020 08:35 AM
Mar 07 2020 10:59 AM
It seems the discussion is irrelevant: https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-may-end-up-rebranding-cortana-as-microsoft-365-assistant/
"Ask Microsoft 365 assistant"? Someone needs to get fired.
Mar 07 2020 12:50 PM
Apr 18 2020 07:43 AM
Apr 18 2020 08:12 AM
Apr 21 2020 12:58 PM
I loved the Ask Cortana feature. I mostly used it to quickly find the definition of a word I didn't know, which was quite often. I also used it for just about everything. If I needed to find out where a referenced location was, I would use "Ask Cortana". The ability to pin it to the side of the page was also very useful. The only thing I would change about it is the look. It would be great to have dark mode added, and it would also be nice if it looked more like Windows Search web results. That would make it more consistent and sleek. I'm really excited to see this feature in the future. The "search the for..." feature just isn't as convenient.
Apr 28 2020 04:07 PM
The Cortana feature was very useful in the original Edge. It came in very useful when researching movies or something when Cortana would offer to bring up a page to view it, and it was very useful for online shopping. Times when you see the message to the right of the address bar were decently rare, but it was very useful the times that you did see it. It's hard to mention all the times I could use that feature. It was just very handy and very useful.
Apr 29 2020 08:18 AM
Ask Cortana wasn't the only Cortana feature that was great about Edge--it was the fact that Cortana could pop up in the URL bar and help with other things too. It was super useful to see her provide better deals when doing online shopping or providing more news articles, and I'd like to see that be reimplemented along with Ask Cortana.
Better yet, I'd like to see that feature be expanded to other features. I don't know exactly how she could be implemented, but I think a potentially great idea would be if Cortana could automatically suggest or create Collections based on sites you visit--the shopping feature, for example, could be expanded to not only suggest better deals, but to group them all in a Collection automatically so you can view them later. The same feature could be used for her suggestion of similar news articles. Collections could be a wonderful tool for expanding Cortana's abilities within Edge.
Also, one of the features I like most about Cortana was that she appeared in a sidebar that didn't take you out of your workflow. This was great about the Edge experience overall, and I'd love to see that implemented back in with Favorites, History, and Downloads.
Apr 29 2020 09:09 AM
Very well said. I couldn't really think of all the ways Cortana in Edge helped, but you explained them well. I agree with what you said completely.
May 05 2020 06:39 AM
@Elliot Kirk a pop-up menu like on Edge on mobile phone would be extremely useful!