Tech Talk Hub

Windows 10 features Microsoft's very own virtual assistant, Cortana. Like Google Assistant,  Apple's Siri  and  Amazon's Alexa , she's designed to help you discover more things that you need and help you find files, settings and much more.  How do you access Cortana on a PC? Cortana on a  Windows 10 PC  is accessible through the search button in the taskbar, which is right beside the Start button or you can just hit the Windows key and start typing. From the taskbar, you can type in the search box for text queries, or you can click the microphone button to use voice recognition and perform tasks hands-free. Cortana can be configured on a Windows 10 PC or tablet to wait and listen. With a quick setting change (which we detail in full below), all you have to do is say "Hey, Cortana" to wake the feature.  What is Microsoft Windows 10 S? How does Cortana work? Cortana's features include setting reminders for yourself, recognising th...

We’ve envisioned automated assistants for decades, but can Siri meet our needs? Our expectations were set up decades ago by the likes of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the computer of the U.S.S. Enterprise on "Star Trek." We've all been waiting for our computers to start talking and responding to us like real people. Real people with massive IQs and tremendous amounts of knowledge at their virtual fingertips, that is. Even Apple had early visions of this voice-assisted future. In the late 1980s, Apple came up with a concept called Knowledge Navigator. The company produced a series of videos that showed people interacting with this fictitious system via a  touch screen  tablet and natural conversation. Its avatar looked and sounded perfectly human, and it could conduct a flawless conversation with you to help you plan your schedule, communicate with friends and colleagues, and access all sorts of networked information. They haven't quite reached...

The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956, but AI has become more popular today thanks to increased data volumes, advanced algorithms, and improvements in computing power and storage. Early AI research in the 1950s explored topics like problem solving and symbolic methods. In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense took interest in this type of work and began training computers to mimic basic human reasoning. For example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) completed street mapping projects in the 1970s. And DARPA produced intelligent personal assistants in 2003, long before Siri, Alexa or Cortana were household names. This early work paved the way for the automation and formal reasoning that we see in computers today, including decision support systems and smart search systems that can be designed to complement and augment human abilities. While Hollywood movies and science fiction novels depict AI as human-like robots that take over the world, the...