Cortana commands we need right now
Since its first inception into Windows 8.1 phones, Microsoft has put a lot of work into Cortana, all the way into Windows 10. Cortana is capable of doing many things, like opening apps, send emails, search the web, and answer all sorts of questions. With that said, As a virtual assistant, Cortana shows great potential, however, when introducing a voice-activated virtual assistant in a desktop environment, things need to work a little differently than on a phone.
Opening URL’s
It doesn’t happen very often, but once in awhile we’d wish we could tell Cortana to open a particular website. If we were to tell Cortana “open portableone.com”, what we would get is a list of search results according to what Cortana understands, which is “open portable one dot com”. This is not very practical if we need to open complex websites, or specific pages and sections of a website, as Cortana wouldn’t know how to parse components like “/” (forward slash), “.” (dot), and extensions like .com .net .org, etc.
Unfortunately there is no way, so far, to get Cortana to understand when a phrase needs to be all in one word, or when no spaces are required between punctuation, which is what happens when we type a web URL. Funny enough, this is something that we often take for granted, as we are so used to parse a URL in our mind, without considering that a computer takes the same information in a much more literal sense.
The trick to accomplish this feat would be in the way Cortana needs to parse information. For instance, let’s say we told Cortana “open portable one dot com in google chrome”.
The first thing Cortana needs to do is to take the sentence as a whole, and process it according to a specific string of words within the sentence. For instance, if the last words in the sentence are “in google chrome”, Cortana should understand that everything between “open” and “in google chrome” must be considered as some sort of Internet address. Consequently, this will cause Cortana to open Google Chrome with the specific URL string contained between the words “open” and “in google chrome”.
In-app navigation
Cortana is very good at opening apps and desktop programs. Unfortunately she’s not as good as performing other tasks within those apps.
For example, let’s say we wanted to do some cardio on the treadmill while reading the latest news on Flipboard, which is a news aggregator app which can be customized to display news articles and blogs from a multitude of websites.
Flipboard is a great app that is designed for touchscreens, but one thing she doesn’t have, is the ability to use voice commands to perform tasks like flipping pages forward and backwards, or opening a specific news tile.
Sadly, this is something that is up to third party developers to figure out, with that said, there is a wide array of Microsoft apps that could use a little help as far as voice-controlled features. For instance, Microsoft Office 365 apps can definitely benefit from a few voice enhancements.
System commands
At the moment, Cortana’s ability within Windows 10 are restricted to opening apps.
Cortana is unable to close applications, or run complex system commands. For instance she’s unable to perform a virus scan on a specific file, encrypt a folder, or copy and paste files from one location to another of the PC. Most importantly, she’s not yet able to shutdown a PC, which would require privileges that we are not so sure Microsoft is willing to grant to Cortana, just yet.
System commands are a tricky thing, however it’s worth considering, especially in light of the fact that power users would definitely appreciate such feature.