Aug 25, 2015 How to get Cortana on your Mac. Apple has yet to bring Siri to the Mac, but that doesn't mean you can't use a competing personal assistant to give your computer voice commands. Microsoft Cortana app for iPhone updated with redesigned UI and new features. In addition, the app gets new full-page answers that the company hopes will make the experience more immersive. And you should also notice improved performance, according to the company, by way of faster page transitions and improved app responsiveness. The updated Cortana for iPhone app is available on the App Store now. Alone in the dark 1992 download mac.
Microsoft has made a huge deal of the fact that its virtual assistant, Cortana, can run on Windows 10, even on your desktop PC. This is a supposed advantage over the Mac, since Apple hasn’t opted to include Siri on OS X. Not that Apple couldn’t do it, but this is clearly a design and/or. Play the songs, albums, playlists and podcasts you love on the all-new Pandora. Explore subscription plans to stream ad-free and on-demand. Listen on your mobile phone, desktop, TV, smart speakers or in the car.
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Once you have set up your environment, you can dive in and build your first Cortana skill. As you learned in the previous module, you can develop a Cortana skill on either a Mac or a PC running Windows 10 Anniversary Update (build 1607) or later, using your choice of development tools. For more information on setting up your development environment, see Set up your development environment.
This module shows the basics of creating a Cortana skill using the Azure Portal and Azure Bot Service. First, you'll create a bot, and then register it and connect it to the Cortana channel to make it a Cortana skill.
For more information on creating your first skill, see Create your first skill.
Step 1 - Create a bot using the Azure Bot Service
To create a bot using the Azure Bot Service, first open the Microsoft Azure Portal and log in with your Microsoft account.
Enter a name for your bot. The bot service uses the bot name as the default name for the resource group name and app name.
Specify your subscription plan, location, app name, and the bot template you want to use, and then click
Create . To create a simple guided conversation bot that pretends to book a trip for you, use the Basic template.
Note
The process described automatically create an Azure App Registration, providing an App ID and password.There are times you want to create these manually (or have an IT administrator create them). In these cases,please review the App Registration documentation.Cortana requires that access tokens be version 2, and that the skill (app) be multi-tenant.You can verify the manifest under App Registrations, and check
'accessTokenAcceptedVersion': 2 and'signInAudience': 'AzureADandPersonalMicrosoftAccount' are set.
It may take a while to provision and initialize your bot. When the process is complete, you'll be taken to a screen that lists your resource. Spiderman download game free pc. From here, you can test your bot. If it's not listed under
Recent resources , click on See all your resources .
In the
All resources pane, you should see your skill name listed. There will probably be more than one entry on the list. Click on the one whose type is Web App Bot .
This will bring up a summary screen showing the options for your bot. The screenshot below highlights the two testing options,
Test in Web Chat and Test your bot online in Web Chat . You can click on either one. They both take you to the same test screen.
In the test screen, try typing something over the
Type your message. prompt at the bottom of the screen. It doesn't matter what you enter, you'll see the screen shown below.
Again, when you see the
What can I help you with today? query, it doesn't matter what your response is. The test will always ask Where would you like to travel to? . This is the start of a guided conversation about booking a trip. The bot isn't actually doing anything on the backend. You can book any trip you like, as this sample shows.
Step 2 - Explore the code
The dxtBasic bot uses .NET C# code that is part of the Basic bot template. To view the code behind the bot:
When the online editor opens, it will display the readme file (readme.md).
As you can see by looking at the sidebar, there's C# code in the
Bots , Controllers , and Dialogs sections. For this example, the bot's confirmation output line has been changed in MainDialog.cs (highlighted below). For the changes to take effect, you need to redeploy the bot. Click the Open Console icon to open the console window.
After the console opens, enter
build.cmd .
You'll see a lot of status lines printed to the console. Once the process is complete, you can return to the
Test pane to test your bot. In this case, after going through the guided conversation again, you'll see a different confirmation line.
Step 3 - Connect your Azure Bot to the Cortana Channel
Broforce full version free download mac. Once you have created a bot, connect it to the Cortana channel to make it a Cortana skill.
On the bot's Overview page, click on the
Connect your bot to channels. link. Malwarebytes for mac review.
On the Configure Cortana page, scroll down to the
Discovery and Management section and click Manage . Click the Publish menu tab and then Publish to self to open the channel configuration settings, where you can specify an optional icon for the skill, a display name, and the invocation name. Formatting hard drive for mac. Cortana uses the invocation name you specify to invoke the skill.
On the Channels tab of the Azure Portal, you can now see Cortana listed as an
mva-hello-world bot service channel.
To return to the
Configure Cortana page, where you can update the skill's configuration settings, click Edit . To test your new skill, direct Cortana to invoke the skill using the invocation name you specified. For example, 'Cortana, tell Hello World 'hi there'.'
I’ve enjoyed having a digital assistant on my Mac since Parallels Desktop started supporting Windows 10. Now that I’m digging into the macOS Sierra beta, I have been using Siri for a lot of tasks as well. Time for a head on match (knock-out round won’t come until after Sierra is out for general release) of Siri vs Cortana on your Mac – what can each digital assistant do?
Siri vs Cortana on your Mac
The biggest difference you’ll notice between the digital assistants is that while Cortana has the option to have your mic always listening for you to summon her, (an option I eventually turned off because she kept hearing dialogue in my RPG games as “Hey Cortana!” and taking me out of full screen mode) Siri does not. You have to click the Siri buttons to summon her, while you can click on Cortana’s bar and mic or you can just type your question directly to Cortana. Both digital assistants are waiting to talk to you, but no matter what, you’ll look like George Jetson talking to your computer in public.
Not wanting to recreate the wheel, I started from a fantastic comparison Lance Ulanoff did on the two digi assistants over on Mashable. He did a great job showing what each would do natively in their own OSes, but I wanted to know what exactly they could do both running on my MacBook.
Let’s start with were you can find them. In your VM’s, you’ll see that you can reach Siri in two places, rather than the stationary start menu for Cortana.
Let’s get into where some of the differences are a little more apparent for the two digital assistants.
“Change my screen brightness”
I had the same results Lance did with Cortana and Siri with this question. While Siri was pretty helpful and actually performed my task for me while bringing up the slider for me to adjust, Cortana Bing’d an answer for me. (That was as painful for me to write as it was for you to read, I assure you). Though Siri didn’t walk me through a “getting to know my voice” set-up, so my first attempt at “change my screen brightness” turned into “Ice cream brightness” – which she at least responded with a joke that made me laugh rather than cringe at misunderstanding me!
Not what I was asking, but I suppose I am curious, how DO you make a dinosaur float?
“Turn off my Wi-Fi”
Here’s where things got a little tricky. Unlike Lance, my Cortana is running in a virtual machine, and she didn’t respond well to my request to turn off my Wi-Fi – likely due to the internet connection being a shared network from my host macOS. (though at first she seemed to think I was asking her to “turn off my Wife I” which is a totally different sort of request) Cortana ended up telling me that this setting isn’t supported on my device. Siri, when asked to turn off my Wi-Fi did warn me that doing so would stop me from being able to user her afterwards.
Siri and Cortana – turn off my wi-fi!
“Move my lunch meeting with Megan to tomorrow” Quicken alternatives for mac.
This ask didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. In many cases each digital assistant played pretty well in the other OS! We’ve had Cortana open Mac applications, and Siri is opening up my Windows programs like a champ. But when it comes to the nitty gritty- not just open up my programs, but interact with the files within – this became a problem. I tried my best to force the issue – set the default files for .ics to Microsoft Outlook, default .msg to Calendar – all to no avail. When you go to your resident program manager / engineer who says that the AI for the digital assistant should respect the OSes settings (which I took as “Megan, will you please stop trying to break the AI”), I decided to give up. Siri is awesome in your Mac Calendar, and Cortana is a rad assistant for your Outlook calendar, but they are just not interested in working cross platform in this zone (yet).
“How fast is my computer?”
Cortana once again opened up Bing (I can’t bring myself to say she “Bing’d” something again) to answer my question of “How fast is my computer?”, while Siri was a rockstar at bringing up my specs. (I didn’t even bother asking Cortana how much iCloud storage data I had left).
Instructions For Cortana Windows 10
I’m struggling with trying to find my way to only one digital assistant right now. Both Siri and Cortana have their strengths – but as it stands with Siri in beta, and how Cortana plays with macOS in a virtual machine, it’s clear that for the time being I’m going to need both of them. Cortana is my calendaring wizard since I am stuck with Microsoft Office as my required email program, and Siri will be my life saver when I have to search for something like “find the file I named “computer kitten” last week.
(btw, this is the computer kitten file I was looking for)
Cortana For Mac Download
I hope you’re all enjoying your Parallels Desktop 12 virtual machines so far. If you’re doing something rad with your virtual assistants that make you even more productive, leave a comment below and let us know!
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