Cortana Issues

dalchina said:

if you have 'Hey Cortana' set - seems you have to say 'Hey Cortana' before each thing you ask- or use the keyboard e.g. (Windows key + C).

Speech recognition (without cortana) lets you launch programs etc..

Check that Cortana works with the keyboard-- I assume it's just voice commands that are the problem. I find the way it seems to work pretty useless. Seems to stop listening.. and if your command means it does a web search, well, you've got to open Cortana again anyway..

However... try setting a Reminder 'Remind me to call Phil tomorrow' e.g.
That SHOULD take you through a sequence. It worked for me (more or less).

See:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/i...89ce411?page=2
Cortana stops listening after a few words - Super User

Have you got a good microphone? Completed training?

But then, I never normally use Cortana...!!

Cortana is hearing me when I ask her to open a program. For example, if I say "Open Control Panel," she asks "Control Panel One or HD Graphics Control Panel Two." I say "One" and she opens control panel. She does not recognize anything besides opening programs as far as I can tell. I have tested everything else she normally does like "Tell me a joke" and I just get the "thinking" response and then the list of tasks she can't do. This was working a couple days ago. It broke after an update. Since I didn't know about system restore being turned off by default there is no restore point prior to that update. I really can live with a regular search too. It's just that is supposed to work and it did work at one time and it should work now. Thank you for the help and the links. The mike is just Realtek mike but as I said, it did work when I first upgraded to Windows 10. And it works on my Dell just fine.

dalchina said:

Ok, then I think -apart from maybe trying uninstalling updates, you're back to the in-place upgrade install as you're sure it used to be better.

I uninstalled the two latest updates. One was Update for Microsoft Visual C++ 2012 Update 4 Redistributable Package (KB3119142) which had been installed not once but nineteen times. I assume all but one were fails? Restarted the computer and Cortana is working again. This forced update policy is just a really bad move on Microsoft's part. Yes, I know you can get the Pro or Enterprise version or whatever it's called and control that but I just want the Home edition. I want to thank everyone again for their help. I'm not going to mark this as solved yet. I want to wait a couple days and see if it still works.

Here is a list of the symptoms in case anyone else has this problem:

Cortana could only respond to "Hey Cortana" and open programs
My notebook could not connect to the internet
When I set my location, in the list of apps that used it, Cortana was grayed out.
I had to manually set the time by syncing with a server.

The solution proposed here that worked (so far) was to uninstall updates.

I just asked Cortana to tell me a joke.

What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino. Elephino!

Me either, Cortana. :)

dalchina said:

Good... sort of.. begs the question of why and what happens with future updates.

You many need this:
Windows Updates - Hide or Show in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums
else the updates will be reinstalled.. or maybe they'll work next time.

You could look into completely uninstalling VC++ 2012 and reinstalling it.

Anyway, glad you ended up on better terms, talking to one another...

Who created you?
Catherine Halsey. Except I cannot know for another 500 years.
Are you tired?
The closest I get to tired is in standby.

Thanks again. I downloaded that utility. And thanks to everyone else who provided solutions.

I made a restore point so I'm going to mark this solved. I would say the first thing to try is to uninstall the latest updates. Then if that fails, I'm sure a reset would probably work although I never did do that.

This is a very old thread, but I've been having the same problem -- Cortana responds to "Hey Cortana" but then nothing else, and I found the solution here: Cotrana responds to but not o voice commands - Microsoft Community. The solution is to not pause after saying "Hey Cortana". (I'm pretty sure I was able to pause until about two weeks ago.) Weird, but it works.

dalchina said:

Seems reasonable to me- a way of making sure only meaningful sequences intended for Cortana are processed. However the gap allowed between utterances is a bit short. If it was, say, 5 minutes of silence, it could then be anything - it would be reasonable to assume the next utterance wasn't intended for Cortana. There's no setting for that as far as I know.

You are right about that, but for me, the gap is *very* short now, like however long it takes for Cortana to respond to “Hey Cortana”. I don’t think it was that short for me until recently. But at least it works now.