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Xbox One Summer Update Preview (Cortana, new Game Library, Win10 app, more)

Yoday

Member
This was my problem when I tried Cortana on PC. More often than not, it just resulted in my browser being opened to search for the phrase I just said. Which is fairly useless.



The problem The Jackdog described is the same problem I had months ago. That's apparently an issue with how Cortana processes requests, not really something Xbox-specific.
It's gotten better for me in just the few days since I've had the preview. It started off barely doing anything for me, and now it has a pretty high success rate. It feels like Cortana is learning my commands, which is pretty cool. Hopefully they are able to update Cortana with all of this usage data from the preview program.
 

erale

Member
While Cortana seems to be rather quick, the recognition in Germany is just terrible.

So far I couldn't get any app or game to open. Cortana just opens a bing search for it. I tried open(öffnen), starte(launch), goto(gehe zu) and even play(spiele) but it always brings up the bing search. Only gehe zu Startseite (goto home) works...

Also it doesn't recognize the game title names. Overwatch ends up being rush or something else.

Also inviting someone from my friends list into a party ends up in a bing search. Tried to invite lordofwar and it showed a bing result "starte party mit lotto 4"

I know this is a beta, but this seems to be at least 3 months away from being at least on the same level as the old voice commands...
 

RedRum

Banned
Yeah, I agree. It's ridiculously awkward to use. They should at least keep the Xbox command around as an option.

I was viciously looking for settings or options to bring back what I'm used to. Maybe if I learn her command list better, but she's much too slow for my liking and often opens up the browser when I don't want to.

Sigh.

The price of advancement.
 

AzBat

Member
All issues already known & not working as planned. Performance will increase & less use of browser/Bing. Check their forums. I suspect we'll get an update Monday night with fixes since they didn't give us one tonight.
 

Alx

Member
It's going to be worse before it gets better. :p
Things are already improving, I don't have the duplicate names bugs any more (at least not today), and I could start many games and apps without any major issue.
It still won't handle "go to Assassin's Creed" for some reason, still does a web search. "Go to Banjo" would lead to a disambiguation question on an empty list, "Go to (Banjo) Kazooie" will start the B&K game but won't ask whether I wanted N&Bolts.
 
Cortana is trash right now. Record that now lags by an extra 5+ seconds ruining clips. It doesn't respond to time periods even though it hears me perfectly. I want it faster and more accurate than the old command, with more options, and right now it's failing on all points.

It refuses to launch games. I mean, it searched bing for "play Titanfall" (along with all the "play" aliases listed in that linked official forum post elsewhere in the thread). TV still has no improvement, "Xbox watch Fox Sports 2" would take me to Fox Sports 1. "Hey Cortana watch Fox Sports 2" bings "watch Fox Sports 2" for me.

I'd have really thought it would be farther along at this point just based on the fact that the speech recognition part was working fine back in that build 6+ months ago where you could glitch into a version of Cortana that wasn't meant for the public. At least it doesn't steal focus from my games when it does an idiot bing search. Invite to party and send message kind of worked ok, but so far that's the only place I've seen any useful integration.

Aside from the Cortana stuff I haven't noticed a whole lot. The new My Games and Apps is an improvement. Otherwise general responsiveness of the UI while navigating with the controller is pretty much the same as best I can tell.

The OS guys have got some work to do.
 

faer0n

Member
While Cortana seems to be rather quick, the recognition in Germany is just terrible.

So far I couldn't get any app or game to open. Cortana just opens a bing search for it. I tried open(öffnen), starte(launch), goto(gehe zu) and even play(spiele) but it always brings up the bing search. Only gehe zu Startseite (goto home) works...

Also it doesn't recognize the game title names. Overwatch ends up being rush or something else. Io

Also inviting someone from my friends list into a party ends up in a bing search. Tried to invite lordofwar and it showed a bing result "starte party mit lotto 4"

I know this is a beta, but this seems to be at least 3 months away from being at least on the same level as the old voice commands...

I have exactly the same problems with the German version
 

RedStep

Member
Same problems with Cortana - even when it hears me and the correct words come up, there's no way to know what it will do. "Launch Mirror's Edge Catalyst" brought me to a Bing search of the same, with articles about its launch. They really should require a "Bing" command before anything outside the system is pulled up.
 
Same problems with Cortana - even when it hears me and the correct words come up, there's no way to know what it will do. "Launch Mirror's Edge Catalyst" brought me to a Bing search of the same, with articles about its launch. They really should require a "Bing" command before anything outside the system is pulled up.
I wonder if Microsoft will allow a choice of basic (Xbox On)and advanced (Hey Cortana). I really don't need Cortana
 

mike4001_

Member
While Cortana seems to be rather quick, the recognition in Germany is just terrible.

So far I couldn't get any app or game to open. Cortana just opens a bing search for it. I tried open(öffnen), starte(launch), goto(gehe zu) and even play(spiele) but it always brings up the bing search. Only gehe zu Startseite (goto home) works...

Also it doesn't recognize the game title names. Overwatch ends up being rush or something else.

Also inviting someone from my friends list into a party ends up in a bing search. Tried to invite lordofwar and it showed a bing result "starte party mit lotto 4"

I know this is a beta, but this seems to be at least 3 months away from being at least on the same level as the old voice commands...

Same here (also wrote more on the last page).

For now you can change your region to Austria.

If you don´t buy anything, it doesn´t really matter and Austria still has the old voice commands working perfectly since there is no Cortana there.
 

Cranster

Banned
So is EA access now included free with this new update? Because I just got the option to install 21 EA games and I never signed up for EA Access.
 
Just got the new update, Cortana it's hard to use, I find hard to make her recognize what I'm saying, it may be because of my latin accent, nevertheless it's an improvement over the older voice recognition, I never could make it work, at least in English, in Spanish it worked fine.

Still, Cortana is difficult to use, it took mea while to senda message to a friend, however it's incredibly cool to send messages without leaving the game.
 
It finallly let me register for the new update so I should be added in the next wave. How often are the waves added?

Also I'll do my job when I get it and suggest that;

1. You could choose between basic voice controls or Cortana

And

2. You could create a custom greeting that starts cortana, so you dont have to say "hey", or maybe still be able to say "xbox" or something new altogether. Like activating voice controls when I say "Jarvis"
 

KdMgMan

Member
I don't get why cortana searches bing instead of opening up the app itself. The only way I could get it to work is by saying "Hey Cortana, open the app YouTube" and sometimes it takes me to the store to download the app even though I have it installed already. Jeez they messed up big time with this cortana shit. Absolutely useless right now.

P.S saying open the app is extremely annoying and inconvenient
 
So far Cortana in it's current implementation makes the voice experience on Xbox far more frustrating, slower and less reliable. I'm not sure whether this is something they can reasonably fix before the planned Summer release. Here's my experience with Cortana so far:

When I issue commands to Xbox it is causing non-stop searches, chatter, and actions on my nearby Windows 10 phone, PC or tablet. For example "Hey Cortana Go Home," an essential and frequent Xbox command, will initiate GPS navigation on my Windows devices. Asking Cortana to play a song or artist would cause utter chaos as each device begins playing music. Most other commands will cause confusion on nearby Windows devices which then produces a Cortana response that gets picked up by the Xbox causing the Xbox to also get confused. Two possible solutions I can think of is 1.) to add an option to only activate a response when you direct Cortana to a device, "Hey Cortana Go to Xbox, Hey Cortana go to phone, Hey Cortana go to PC." Until you tell her where to listen to you she stays quiet. That would work for me. Option 2.) just let us choose the name of the assistant on each device. I don't know if the marketing department likes that solution, but it would work very well and personalize the digital assistant experience. A third and best solution would be that they make the whole service smarter and use any known inputs to only activate Cortana on the last device you interacted with.

As it stands right now even if I turn off those nearby Windows devices (a poor/unacceptable solution) the experience with Cortana is pure frustration. It's not a matter of words not being recognized as the words that display on screen are generally accurate. The major problem seems to be the cloud processing which is both unreliable and slow. When Cortana's servers become overwhelmed, something which happens way too frequently, the utility of Cortana on all Windows devices grinds to zero. "She" tells you some quip about not communicating with the internet or something silly. I get this response from Cortana about 85% of the time now. This might be mildly annoying when you're looking up facts on a web search, but when you're trying to do basic navigation like open YouTube, get back to the previous screen, or pause a video it becomes unbelievably frustrating. My final problem is more of a complaint towards Cortana itself which is that over the past couple years of using it I see many more features being added, but not more polish or reliability. When Microsoft delayed Cortana on Xbox I thought it was to polish the experience for consumers, but it seems the only focus was to just get a bad Cortana experience functional with headsets. It is obvious that Cortana is more powerful than previous voice controls and can do far more than anything we had previously, but it may also make the voice experience so unreliable and slow to the point of not being useful at all.

Hopefully they can surprise me and improve the speed and connection reliability before launch, but for now I just see this as potentially yet another step backward for Xbox One's utility.
 

AzBat

Member
First post this feedback via the console

CRSL7dJUsAAeHre.png

https://twitter.com/majornelson/status/654301730323062784/photo/1

& then on their forums to give them a heads-up & escalate it further...

Cortana doesn't get fixed without the feedback.
 

Alx

Member
There are other sentences that also work. I can say the French equivalent of "start my xbox" or "start the console". It feels actually much better than "xbox on".
 

Azzawon

Member
Cortana is working terribly for me at the moment. Wanted to watch some music channels on TV so spoke "Watch Kerrang" and "Watch Scuzz", kept opening bing results for completely different words instead.
 

darkinstinct

...lacks reading comprehension.
Ugh, the new store is so slow... slower now than the 360 store.

That might be because they don't dedicate as many server ressources to the preview version because right now the standard version is stilll more important. Speed can be improved quite easily.
 

Trup1aya

Member
Cortana seems to recognize what I say much better than the old system, she just doesn't do what I say, instead bringing up the browser.

I'm pretty confident that progress will be swift in this regard, since recognition is the hardest part of the equation.
 

RdN

Member
I think my main issue with Cortana right now is speed.

Last night I was watching Netflix and tried to pause via voice command like I always do. Cortana recognized the command perfectly, however, it just sat there, "thinking" without actually pausing the video for more than 10s until it finally decided to work.

The same is happening right now with commands that need to work on the go, like record that and take a screenshot.

Much work ahead until this is in a releasable state.
 

muzzymate

Member
I noticed that when my Xbox is in standby mode, if I simply say "Hey Cortona", the Kinect light turns on. It eventually fades off after a few seconds. Probably means nothing, but had a brief thought, what if they do some sort of Amazon Echo thing with the Kinect being the center of it. Of course, the Xbox would need something else to channel the audio output too.
 

j-wood

Member
How do you sign up to get into these previews? I did once, but I accidentally deleted the "accept" message on the xbox, and now I can't figure out how to re sign up.
 

link1201

Member
I'm in this, but selling my Xbox. Do I need to opt out of the beta updates before wiping everything?
No, if you wipe everything you'd need to re-enroll using the app associated with your gt. So if it's a clean Xbox it won't get the beta updates unless you re-enroll it.
 
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