Windows 10 Cortana Integration

[xzener]

Hello JitterJames,

Cortana is great on the Windows Phone... Rumer has it, Windows 10 will have Cortana built in. This would be the perfect addition to Vox Commando. Ive seen videos of Dom Controller, even with an asian guy with "not so good" engrish. Cortana seems to responds very well to his voice.

http://www.domcontroller.com/en/

Any plans for Cortana integration with Vox Commando??

Xzener

[xzener]

Or at least VoxWav for Windows Phones perhaps?

[jitterjames]

Perhaps. It's a pretty small demographic.

But can't you run VoxCommando directly on a Windows 10 phone?

[xzener]

Why would I want to run VC on a phone? I wouldn't mind using Cortana to voice commands.

[jitterjames]

Why wouldn't you? 

According to our FAQ, VC will make you popular with the ladies.  Now imagine what would happen if you had it running on your W10 phone...  You'll have to beat them off with a stick. 

[RickyD333]

Funny enough, there are women that WANT to come to my place to see my Voxcommando home automation. LOL, thanks James!

I found this video today. It's from last year, but has some nice information on Cortana integration for developers. I really think integrating Cortana into Voxcommando would be really fantastic. The fun developer information really hits at around 13min in the video.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Dev-Inspiration/What-Developers-Need-To-Know-About-the-Cortana-API


And wait... VC can run on Windows Phone? Cool! If I can find some decent apps that let me make my own phone UI (like Nova Launcher and UCCW on Android) I might switch over. 

[jitterjames]

And wait... VC can run on Windows Phone? Cool! If I can find some decent apps that let me make my own phone UI (like Nova Launcher and UCCW on Android) I might switch over.

I really don't know if it can run on a Windows 10 phone or not.  I know it can run on some tablets but they are running a full Windows OS.

I don't have a Windows phone and don't have much interest in getting one.  I'm still OK with my 4 year old Android phone that Kalle gave me.

[sniperkiller]

I wanted to change cortana name and add some extra scripts to its workings, so I found several things about programming using cortana API, which could be really usefull for you, this is for pc, not for mobile

http://talkitbr.com/2015/07/13/integrando-a-cortana-em-seu-aplicativo-windows-10/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30431688/how-to-connect-cortana-commands-to-custom-scripts

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27670696/how-to-modify-cortana-voice-activation-commands-xml-in-c

lenovo already made a "plugin" for cortana
http://www.getreachit.com/

I am a programmer and I am thinking about creating some simple program that can run a script alike to TellVoxCommando.exe but I would asume you would be far better at doing this than me =P

[jitterjames]

I think you should go for it.

Sending commands to VC is very simple.  Let me know if you need help with that part.

For my part, I guess I need someone to explain to me how they actually see this working and what the benefits would be.

If you want to use Cortana, why not just run both side by side and use a prefix for VC?

[Haddood]

Scenario 1:
Cortana replaces MS VR engine... so Cortana will do the VR and send the text to VC ... it even has a prefix mode which is "Hey Cortana" ... for always on scenario
this way alot of the commands we did ...will be readily available ... like alarms, reminders, time date ...etc. and VC will be mainly an automation engine with interface to introduce commands to Cortana ...

sin a way Cortana to VC will be what VC used to be for EG

Scenario 2:
VC calls function programed in Cortana ... like when we say "VC remind me to call my dad in 5 minutes" it will send the text to Cortana ... so basically Cortana will be an extension to VC ...
this will require building all cortana commands in VC ... maybe read Cortana xml for built in commands (if there is one)
 
Scenario 3:
I do not know if Cortana needs internet to function like Siri (if it uses massive computing power on a server to improve the accuracy), or it depends on MS VR in windows ... if it uses MS VR ... then maybe all it need is simple communication: finding a way that put Cortana to listen the moment VC start listening ... ex. after prefix.start event ... then if Cortana recognize the command, it generate an event in VC. with info about it  ... so VC can give feedback ...
like this each one of VC and Cortana handles its own commands

[jitterjames]

I've just been playing around with Cortana a bit since my free upgrade to Windows 10 came through on my HTPC.

Sadly it seems that running Cortana kills Windows speech recognition completely, so I can't use VC at the same time.  The only solution I have found is to disable Cortana and then to do a full restart.  Sometimes it works, but I think only if VC is already running first or something.  Anyway, for now it is totally unusable on my system so I have disabled Cortana.

I found a lot of other problems with Cortana anyway.  Hopefully they will improve it over time. 
* You need to set your OS location to the USA for it to work at all.
* You need to sign into Windows using a MS account (*yuck*) and not a local account for it to work at all.
* It only works in English.
* It uses your IP for your location which you can't override and in my case the location is completely wrong (by about 700 km).

Cortana worked extremely well for setting up a reminder, and the recognition accuracy for doing a search using open dictation seems very good.  I could not get it to do anything else really, it just kept opening up a Bing search page for everything I said.  Maybe I didn't read the instructions properly.

[sniperkiller]

I found this also:

Cortana + AutoVoice - Voice Automation from your PC:

http://joaoapps.com/autovoice/cortana/


I live in Colombia and have cortana configured in Spanish, it works perfectly and can even play any song or video by title, artist or playlist, can launch any program (including batch scripts that I create) but you have to say "open" for it to work so saying "open shutdown" is not pretty XD

and with the autovoice option you can do anything now, but it requires an android device to be the "brain", here is how it works:

1. you tell cortana a command that she won't recognize by default
2. cortana searches that command in google chrome (you have to set chrome as default)
3. autoremote intercepts the search and send it to your android
4. in android you receive the message by autoremote, it is sent to autovoice
5. autovoice triggers depending on the command
6. tasker get the trigger
7. you can do anything in tasker
8. ? ? ? ?
9. Done!

in tasker you can send commands to any home automation device, or can send a command to eventghost (which can then send a command do VC)

Still VC is more practical, potent, customizable and have more plugins and integrations so I would rather keep using VC than Cortana, but cortana uses less resources and have a lot of things by default that would take me some time to implement on VC like launching all apps or all songs by tittle, artist or playlist, I have this already on VC but my DB is huge and VC can easily consume about 300MB of ram =S

[marcusvdt]

By reading this thread, I don't see a reason to use Cortana.
300MB of RAM for what VC can do... I think it's nothing nowadays.

All the examples that you guys mentioned add complexity for the automation engine, and I'm not seeing the real gain with it. Is the VR in Cortana so better than the one in VC that this alone makes it a big advantage over VC?
VC can understand me very well with the correct setting and I'm using VC SP.

[jitterjames]

For doing predetermined commands where all possible phrases and payloads are known there is no advantage, but for doing open dictation, web searches etc. it is very good.  Cortana is cloud based which means that it can analyze your audio and compare it to Bing results in order to make a better guess.  It is similar to how Google SR works.

Bing is also good at doing certain things like web searches, texting and calling people and creating reminders etc, but I don't really see how this relates to VC.  It seems like it should just be run beside VC if you want to use it for this.

I don't believe there is any way for VC to talk to Cortana, only for Cortana to talk to VC.  There is no way to use the Cortana TTS voice either as far as I can tell, outside of Cortana itself, so unless Cortana is the one recognizing something there is no way to make her speak.

[RickyD333]

I just posted this for Cortana web searches.

http://voxcommando.com/forum/index.php?topic=2311.0

Like James said, VR engines like Cortana are great for open dictation and web searches. There is a feature in Cortana that allows you to search for files on your system, however I can't seem to 'exactly' find them with voice search -- works great with typing in a file name though. I jumped on the Microsoft community page and asked if this was a bug, if I'm doing it wrong, or if Cortana can't yet do this with voice search. Some Microsoft dude sent me a reply, but for some reason I don't think it will solve this issue. Hopefully we can eventually use Cortana voice search for finding files.