[stephengillie]

New features:

- Voice as text entry for any text input, across the OS. (Surprised this has taken so long; the speech recognition libraries have been in .NET since 2014.)

- Ecobee, Honeywell, Nest integration with Cortana.

-Timeline... Tracks your "stuff" (files? online activity? It's unclear) across all Windows devices. It has 30 days of history. I'm interested in knowing how much of my file and URL history is being sent to MS.

- Focus Assist is a notification cache. It will pend notifications during focus time, and give you them all at once when focus time is over.

- Edge browser has a few:

-- When a tab is playing audio, clicking on the speaker icon will mute the tab. (Just what we need, yet another mute button to miss.)

-- Autofill for payment info.

-- Full screen mode for PDFs, books, and reader mode.

-- Grammar Check.

[kyriakos]

Timeline, calling it stuff is kinda lame marketing. Been using it as a Windows insider, it keeps track what documents were open in which application. Works great with office but I guess will take a while before all applications add support for it. Generally it's a good idea even if using only one device, think of it as "recent files" on steroids.

[stephengillie]

> Imagine looking at bathroom vanity options for that home remodel when you’re out and about on your phone, and then finishing that purchase when you’re back at your PC.

Most browsers cache files on disk; maybe Timeline keeps track of those cached files, instead of sniffing internet packets?

[oblio]

> When a tab is playing audio, clicking on the speaker icon will mute the tab. (Just what we need, yet another mute button to miss.)

Firefox and Chrome work the same way.

[stephengillie]

Clicking on the speaker icon on Chrome doesn't mute the tab, at least for me. Maybe I have an update pending.

[ThoAppelsin]

> (Surprised this has taken so long; the speech recognition libraries have been in .NET since 2014.)

Dictation already was available on Windows 10, although not so streamlined.

In Windows, there are various forms of on-screen keyboards and some of them have this microphone button somewhere right above the top row of the keyboard flushed to the left. When activated, it starts listening you and dictating whatever you say. So, it's not brand new, more like an improvement to the UI, and also to the AI (as far as I know, recognition has also been improved).

Same goes for the Focus Assist, it was available under the same icon, different nane, "Quiet Hours". I keep it always-on on my PCs for several months now, and use it intermittently on my phone. It also got improvements, but allowing some people to bypass is not one of them.

The rest are new. I'm not saying that they are dishonest, they probably just do not mention it over and over everywhere.

[kbenson]

> - Ecobee, Honeywell, Nest integration with Cortana.

While they're working on Cortana, hopefully they fixed the bug where the search/command/Cortana entry box hangs if the internet is down.

The following sequence of events happens predictably every few days:

- Wifi router crashes or for some reasons goes down.

- All my PuTTY sessions freeze.

- I Obviously can't browse, so I might as well open a command prompt to ping the wifi router to see when it's back.

- I click in the Cortana box so I can type "cmd".

- Search box doesn't respond, doesn't show a cursor, doesn't expand with Cortana window, and doesn't respond to any input, mouse or keyboard.

- "Oh yeah. Cortana completely falls on its face without internet access."

Gets me every goddamn time.

[crtasm]

> I'm interested in knowing how much of my file and URL history is being sent to MS.

If you use Edge it was already able to send browsing history to MS. This is by default, IIRC, it tried to convince me I wanted it last time I setup a win10 box.

https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10-microsoft-edg...