Karlin High
Member
- Reaction score
- 10
- Location
- Missouri, USA
Elderly customer: Someone told me the Amazon Echo devices are really neat, should I get one?
Me: You have a Windows 10 desktop computer, let’s try the Alexa app. We’ll have to get you a microphone, though.
(Detour: I got him a webcam, a Lenovo 500 FHD. It supports Windows Hello but doesn’t have a microphone, a combo I didn’t know exists. No good for voice assistants. Replaced with a desktop microphone, that need is now met.)
What I’m trying to get him is a web search experience like voice assistants on mobile devices have. Where he can say “$HOTWORD, find woodworking plans for a nightstand” and have a web search come up. I’ve had to set some expectations, it’s going to be just a user interface for the computer and not something like Aladdin’s lamp genie.
But I’m having trouble meeting even those lowered expectations.
On Windows 10, it turns out that Alexa is mostly an Amazon sales agent, which makes sense. It does not do web searches.
And Google won’t have their Assistant be a first-class citizen on Windows 10. There’s an unoffical GitHub project to get it working, but the setup is more onerous than getting an Employer ID Number from the USA Internal Revenue Service. I got it going, sort of. It brings up web search results, but clicking on them just does another search for the selected search result instead of actually opening a website. Then I tried Google Assistant from their main web search page, the little microphone beside the text box. Somehow it said “no Internet connection” every time.
And… Cortana. In past years, I know I had it working for another customer. Anything it couldn’t directly answer it would just bring up as a Bing search. But apparently not anymore, since Microsoft’s demotions of it. For this we were force-fed all that disruption of Windows 10 start menu search?
Somehow I thought this voice-recognition web search feature would be an easily-met request, given what’s available on mobile devices. Any advice on what to try next?
Me: You have a Windows 10 desktop computer, let’s try the Alexa app. We’ll have to get you a microphone, though.
(Detour: I got him a webcam, a Lenovo 500 FHD. It supports Windows Hello but doesn’t have a microphone, a combo I didn’t know exists. No good for voice assistants. Replaced with a desktop microphone, that need is now met.)
What I’m trying to get him is a web search experience like voice assistants on mobile devices have. Where he can say “$HOTWORD, find woodworking plans for a nightstand” and have a web search come up. I’ve had to set some expectations, it’s going to be just a user interface for the computer and not something like Aladdin’s lamp genie.
But I’m having trouble meeting even those lowered expectations.
On Windows 10, it turns out that Alexa is mostly an Amazon sales agent, which makes sense. It does not do web searches.
And Google won’t have their Assistant be a first-class citizen on Windows 10. There’s an unoffical GitHub project to get it working, but the setup is more onerous than getting an Employer ID Number from the USA Internal Revenue Service. I got it going, sort of. It brings up web search results, but clicking on them just does another search for the selected search result instead of actually opening a website. Then I tried Google Assistant from their main web search page, the little microphone beside the text box. Somehow it said “no Internet connection” every time.
And… Cortana. In past years, I know I had it working for another customer. Anything it couldn’t directly answer it would just bring up as a Bing search. But apparently not anymore, since Microsoft’s demotions of it. For this we were force-fed all that disruption of Windows 10 start menu search?
Somehow I thought this voice-recognition web search feature would be an easily-met request, given what’s available on mobile devices. Any advice on what to try next?
