Never. I have found the answer to one or two problems in the MS Knowledge Base, though (out of something like 80.)
This whole thing really isn’t anything new.
Microsoft way back when had two separate OS lines. There was Windows, which was for home users, and NT, which was for business users. NT was structurally better with respect to misbehaving programs and was therefore better at multitasking. Windows had better backwards compatibility but was more vulnerable to the entire OS getting trashed by a misbehaving program.
For Windows 2000, Microsoft decided to “merge” the two operating systems (since they didn’t want to maintain two different operating systems). The two operating systems were structurally different. There was no way to merge them. What they really did was kill off the Windows line and forced everyone to NT.
The problem was that a lot of home software programs back then wouldn’t run on NT, so halfway through development they scrapped their “merge” idea and said Windows 2000 would be only for business users. They then slapped some of the features they had planned for 2000 into Windows 98 and called their hastily released piece of crap Windows ME. The “merge” would happen later, at Windows XP.
A lot of “cuter” names and friendlier error messages and the like (clearly designed for the home user) made it into Windows 2000 before they scrapped the merge, and those changes stayed in Windows 2000. The formal “Network Neighborhood” was changed to the more cutesy “My Network Places”, for example.
XP then had its “Fisher Price Interface” which was clearly designed to be less formal, more stylish, and home-user friendly.
That god-awful paperclip (already mentioned) and that stupid search dog are a couple of other examples of Microsoft being cutesy.
This isn’t anything new.
It came back with a response that said the problem was caused by the video driver, and told me that an update was available to fix it. I installed the update, and it fixed it.
So it can happen.
There’s a difference between being less technical and what Microsoft is doing. There’s nothing less technical about “Spelling and grammar check complete. You’re good to go!” versus “The spelling and grammar check is complete.” There’s nothing remotely intimidating about the latter.
It’s not as if Macs use this type of language, either. They are less technical, but they don’t interject personality like this–personality that, if Microsoft Bob and Clippy are any indication, tends to irritate people over time. Sure, at first it may be more welcoming, but the appeal goes away pretty quickly, and starts to turn into something to make fun of.
Plus, right now, they have bigger problems to deal with, like the abysmal look of the Office 2013 interface. If they are trying to be more friendly, why in the world did they make the interface so much more stark and colorless? I found out my copy of Office was pirated, and, for the first time, I just uninstalled it (and the crack) without looking back.
That’s the type of design stuff that matters, not “colloquial language.” and being friendly doesn’t make your application less pointless for the average user.
Well MS had the very cutesy “my documents” file. MS had the extremely annoying paper-clip guy with its leer and its tips, or you could change to a cute doggie. So, yeah.
The thing is, after MS’s spelling and grammar check are complete, you are not necessarily “good to go.” You probably still need an editor.
It’s just the first steps in the inevitable growth of Microsoft into Sirius Cybernetics Corporation:
Yes. :mad:
Good point. How easy it is to forget the damned once they’ve departed.
This movement towards natural language and personality has been going on for a while. Even as a nerdy, computer-literate person, I like it. It can get overdone, but I think most of the recent cited examples are pleasant. They suggest a person was on the other end of the product, even if the verbiage is probably even MORE focus-grouped than the old dry stuff. If it was dumbed-down, I’d be disappointed, but it’s not. It’s just conversational.
The first thing in this vein I really noticed was on the Zune product line – they had a lot of conversational speech in there, right down to every Zune having “Hello from Seattle” printed on the back (in the spot where iPods said “Designed in Cuptertino”).
MS’s Siri competitor, Cortana, seems to be pretty well-liked by users precisely because she/it has more “personality” than the competition. It’s not cloying and off-base like Bob or Clippy. It’s just…a little more fun.
Just wait until your computer says
“I’m sorry, <insert user name here>, I’m afraid I can’t do that for you.”
Then panic.
The name is Dave, and “for you” wasn’t there in the original.
I liked the search dog. Though I wish it would take an animated dump if it couldn’t find what you want.
See, I don’t see it as conversational. I don’t know anyone who actually talks like that. Conversational would be “Your spellcheck’s done.” When it’s something perfunctory like that, you don’t add a cheesy message at the end. And for setup, you’d say something like “It’ll take me a bit to get this set up. I’ll let you know when I’m finished.” You’re not going to be going through giving pointless updates that give your client no information.
(I’ll admit that “Files are syncing as we speak” is pretty okay, though. And none of this is as bad as Google’s “Oh Snap!” for Chrome error messages.)
Siri has personality, too, but she only displays it when you are basically asking her to do so. I haven’t watched Cortana much, but if she has too much personality, I do say you will find her annoying over a while. Because it’s going to become repetitive, unlike a real personality.
It’s funny, because as I was reading your reply, I actually heard a coworker say to a customer, “Your XYZ is finished; you’re good to go.”
Some of it can be repetitive and clunky, but I think most of MS’s move in this direction has been pleasant.
Cortana’s “personality” varies itself and is actually designed to update and change over time. New responses to questions and whatnot. But she’s also succinct and to the point, generally. It’s a pretty uniquely personable piece of software (having recorded lines of a professional voice actor instead of only using text-to-speech helps, too).
That’s not what I want in a technical product. I want it to be dry, reliable, chugging away with its head down, not chatting with me. Just like I won’t go to the tax prep place with the goofy person outside waving at me – it gives an air of unreliability, flippancy.
I can’t see how. It seems to me that that would make it much, much worse. Siri has the capability to say anything, but relying on a voice actor would mean that Cortana is sharply limited to whatever the voice actor has recorded. Now, granted, I don’t expect Siri to use the full possible range of things she’s technically capable of saying, but if, say, I use an obscure word in my question, I can think of a number of cases where a good phone-bot would Eliza that word back in her reply. Cortana either can’t do that, or has to switch back and forth between prerecorded and generated voice whenever she does, and either one would be jarring.
There’s a middle ground with constructing words out of recorded phonemes (there’s a limited set in most languages, about 90 in English). It’s hard to get things like stress and intonation right that way, but it’s gotten a lot better over the last few years.
The voice actress has recorded a LOT of lines that cover a lot of frequent situations. However, a lot of responses use a machine voice that’s been tuned to sound like her (and they, I believe, have said they will continue tinkering to sound more like her). They don’t try to blend the two in any single response, though. It’s really not jarring because there’s a separation. The machine voice generally doesn’t try to be “cute,” it’s more matter of fact. They leave the cute responses in the capable hands of Jen Taylor. It works pretty well.
I don’t especially care too terribly much what the verbiage is. All I want, and rarely see, for any process that takes more than a few seconds, is a bona-fide progress bar that really works properly !
Some processes show progress bars that very badly mis-estimate the amount of the task done and the amount left to go. Many other processes just have totally bogus progress bars that show you absolutely nothing honest. Fuck those with a 2000 volt power surge!
I’m sorry, Senegoid, I’m afraid I can’t do that.