Now, I expect that such a local agent would need to have quite a bit of fine-grained control to satisfy privacy concerns (e.g., do you agree to allow me to send your query about films in your zip code to the MSN Movies site to get showtimes?) But I feel the actual processing of the day-to-day personal assistant features is not only eminently feasible on my desktop, but most likely also on my Surface or laptop.
The cloud is pernicious and voracious, its dominion grows quickly enough without needlessly exaggerating the necessity of offloading computation like this. Local computing devices—especially those that conventionally run Windows (desktop PCs and laptops)—are extremely capable.
Cortana is a cloud agent not because of requisite processing power. Illusory local processing deficiency is just a convenient justification for why it doesn't run locally.
But then, I am a strong advocate of personal compute servers and mainstreaming secure private networks. So I am obviously fringe in today's culture that embraces the centralized cloud.
WRT cloud, we've already reached the point of ridicule with the new generation of Internet-connected hardware. So many useless webapps (er, "value-added cloud analytics platforms") and so many devices sitting centimeters from each other but communicating all the way around the world. There is absolutely no engineering reason for it to look that way - it's all just attempts to milk users by making them depend on cloud services.
You're right about the CPU. However, it's possible that good voice recognition also requires gigabytes of data. That wouldn't work so well for a tablet. Or maybe there is some custom hardware (like DSP chips) in the data center that is used? I don't know, I'm just playing devil's advocate.
I do agree with your sentiments. I'm not about to opt in to this garbage. I came of age in the era of the mainframe and I despised the lack of personal control. I won't willingly return to that. Today's cloud is just yesterday's mainframes and time-sharing by another name.
Maybe you don't find it that useful, but I think that a lot of people would. It will, in a future release, be genuinely useful. It's getting there.
A whole host of the Cortana functionality is local that interacts with online services via API's that you authorize.
I don't think that really anything that I say is going to change your mind, but you could check out some of the video's on Channel9 where they go into it in detail. Some of it's pretty good and if you use headphones you can't hear your co-workers talk about stuff that makes you want to slap someone.
And connecting to O365 calendars offline? Is that not a stupid concept?
