I was the engineering lead on that product, and built a SW platform from scratch for it (Microsoft provided an SDK to Cortana which they developed in parallel.)
The internal build could actually run Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant simultaneously and you could e.g. set an alarm with one of them and query it with another, and they could interrupt each other based on priority. Obviously nobody wanted that feature, but it was hella cool that it worked. Oh, and you could make Skype calls from across the room, and the microphone array lived up to Skype's tough certification requirements which took weeks of testing in Microsoft's anechoic chamber for the DSP/algorithm team to fine tune.
I tried to push for open-sourcing the platform but it was tricky because 1) the director of engineering in Harman didn't know what open source meant and for a hardware focused business to understand the value was a hard sell, 2) it used a HW module that came with a SW stack I mostly got rid off but a few parts were remaining that would need to be replaced which would require additional resources, 3) I was burned out at that point and had limited energy left to fight the good fight. Really too bad, it could have been a cool voice agent development platform, and I honestly think it would have sold in large volumes as a developer-friendly device.
Glad you like it, sorry about the remaining Bluetooth bugs nobody got around to fix, since it basically flopped instantly.
I think you are right regarding limiting English teaching to prevent the population from consuming "enemy" media. Definitely also happening in China where they massively cracked down on English language tutoring two years ago. Probably due to the governments ongoing effort to ramp up nationalism and spread increasingly improbable narratives about current events and history.
I was the engineering lead on that product, and built a SW platform from scratch for it (Microsoft provided an SDK to Cortana which they developed in parallel.)
The internal build could actually run Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant simultaneously and you could e.g. set an alarm with one of them and query it with another, and they could interrupt each other based on priority. Obviously nobody wanted that feature, but it was hella cool that it worked. Oh, and you could make Skype calls from across the room, and the microphone array lived up to Skype's tough certification requirements which took weeks of testing in Microsoft's anechoic chamber for the DSP/algorithm team to fine tune.
I tried to push for open-sourcing the platform but it was tricky because 1) the director of engineering in Harman didn't know what open source meant and for a hardware focused business to understand the value was a hard sell, 2) it used a HW module that came with a SW stack I mostly got rid off but a few parts were remaining that would need to be replaced which would require additional resources, 3) I was burned out at that point and had limited energy left to fight the good fight. Really too bad, it could have been a cool voice agent development platform, and I honestly think it would have sold in large volumes as a developer-friendly device.
Glad you like it, sorry about the remaining Bluetooth bugs nobody got around to fix, since it basically flopped instantly.