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Amazon’s echo
Amazon’s Echo looks promising. I’ve been a huge proponent of a ubiqutous, always-listening, ambient presence personal assistant experiences. There are many articles on the web speculating on the reasons Amazon is doing this.* Whether it’s about making it easier to order things from Amazon, to collect speech data, to take over home automation, etc. it doesn’t…
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Cortana is my sleepless personal assistant – how she deals with the Greek media 🙂
Over the last few days, there has been a bit of media noise in Greece around my name. Two articles were published about my path from Petinos (the little village where I grew up), my graduate studies and research career in the UK, and my current role at Microsoft. I had no idea about the…
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Cortana and Third-Party Services – Foursquare Today… More to Come in the Future
Have you watched the movie “Her”? I think many aspects of the OS’s design in the movie will eventually find their way in personal assistants. Some already are here… “ I do believe that, in the not-so-distant future, personal assistant experiences such as Cortana will be the primary human-computer interface for consuming information and interacting…
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Hackdays on schema.org and Quotes on a Facebook wall
We just completed a 2-day schema.org-related hackathon at the Facebook headquarters. So much fun! It’s so cool seeing companies such as Microsoft, Google, Yandex, and Facebook* come together to code, experiment, and brainstorm on structured data/actions on the Web. Everyone cares about what’s best for the Web. We built prototypes and discussed interesting statistics about the state…
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Reactive Computing at the Heart of Cortana
In my QCon talk last year I talked, amongst many other things, about the need to react to the world’s information streams in near-realtime. The Bing Platform that powers Cortana and the Windows Phone OS were designed and implemented to support that vision. At the very core of each Windows Phone 8.1 device is a…
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My Cortana Interests on Bing.com
Isn’t this beautiful? I am not talking about the photo, which is gorgeous. I am referring to my Cortana interests (weather, stocks, news) that appear at the bottom of the bing.com homepage. We know what the user cares about so we surface it to their screen. Of course users have to be logged in with…
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Cortana
You might have heard the news about Cortana, Microsoft’s entry in the personal assistant space. I am very excited to see Cortana out there, even in her current “beta” state. “The most personal smartphone assistant” (Windows Phone 8.1 features) I have been involved, as the Architect of the Bing cloud platform that powers her, with…
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Please raise your voice against fascism
Mpampis, my great childhood friend, recently posted on his Facebook timeline a variant of Martin Niemöller’s “First they came” poem. It’s been a while since I first read and loved that poem. To me, the poem is a great reminder of the need for all of us to remain informed, engaged, active participants in the…
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Honesty in user interface design
I liked the “Dark Patterns: inside interfaces designed to trick you” article by Harry Brignull. Honesty in how we interact with our customers through our products is probably an obvious practice to most of us. Unfortunately, ill-conceived business thinking lead to products that place profit in front of users. Not surprisingly, as Bringull suggests, users…
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Make computers disappear from every desk and every home
Disclaimer: As everything else in this blog, what follows is my personal opinion! It shouldn’t be news to anyone that Ballmer is retiring from Microsoft. What follows is not about the past or present. It’s a quick note about how I personally see the future and Microsoft’s opportunity to shape it. Even in the late…