- On this episode of Ask Dan,
we're gonna talk about 3x3 wireless antennas,
the future of Cortana,
and what's happening with that
Alexa partnership at Microsoft.
Stay tuned.
(upbeat music)
Are there any 3x3 wireless cards
for the Dell XPS 15 to act as a replacement?
Okay, so I know what you're thinking here.
I don't have a Dell XPS 15,
why would I be interested in this questions?
It's just kind of interesting
because I want to talk about 3x3 wifi cards.
If you don't know what this means,
it has to do with antennas.
Most devices today are 2x2,
although some devices only have one.
What that refers to is the number of antennas in the device.
Obviously, in general, more is better,
and two wifi antennas are very good.
It's what you see in a lot
of the premium high-end Ultrabooks today.
The question is if two's good, why is three not better,
and can you find any 3x3 cards on the market?
Now there's some interesting history here.
I spoke with Killer who makes the wifi cards
for a lot of gaming laptops about this topic.
They told me that the 3x3 cards,
the rate of return for their value
is not quite as good as 2x2.
That is, yes, you do see a signal improvement,
but it's very slight compared to say
going from one antenna to two
where you see a dramatic increase in the performance.
If you notice, a lot of laptops these days
use metal in them which is why sometimes
you see a little cutout for the wifi section.
You can see this on the Surface Pro
which has sort of a grayed-out area.
Companies work very hard to minimize
these wifi lines where the antenna are.
When you add in three antennas,
it becomes more complicated because
now you gotta run those antennas along the lines
with the web camera and it's just an engineering issue.
The short answer is I do not expect
anymore 3x3 wifi cards on the market.
Most companies are gonna go 2x2,
and I think it's gonna be fine for most users.
Just continue down that road.
If you do find a 3x3 for the XPS 15,
it probably will be an older card
and not anything new coming from Intel or Killer.
Is Cortana dying and Alexa going to rule the world?
Okay, so this is a very complicated topic.
In fact, it's so complicated,
I'm gonna do a whole separate video on it.
The short answer is no.
Cortana is not going away.
I know there's been a lot of press out there,
especially at CES,
where Alexa and specifically Google made
a ton of announcements having their services
integrated into a bunch of new products.
Cortana was notably absent.
Now there were some announcements
and I'll talk about this in the other video, but actually,
Microsoft has a lot of plans for Cortana.
I know this is hard to believe,
but they do have a plan for it.
I'll talk about this in the other video,
but the short answer here is that
they're gonna put Cortana into the OS.
Now I know what you're saying,
it already has Cortana in Windows 10.
What I mean is they're gonna weave AI
throughout the entire operating system at the shell level.
That is the plan for RS5 and RS6.
You're gonna have AI and the OS combined into one.
That's sort of a smart decisions, I think,
but they do have a lot of plans for Cortana.
It is not gonna be canceled.
I'll do more of this in a separate video
so stay tuned for that.
Is the Cortana-Alexa partnership still happening?
Okay, so in late 2017,
Microsoft and Amazon announced that they were
going to combine Alexa or Cortana,
or rather those two services would work together.
It's a pretty cool idea,
although it is a bit clumsy in some ways.
After all, asking Cortana to fetch Alexa
to then order something from Amazon
is going to be a mouthful.
There will be ways around this
as natural language processing evolves,
but that's sort of the goal for it right now.
It was supposed to come out around the end of 2017
and of course, that did not happen,
but yes, it is still in planning.
The last we heard is Amazon and Microsoft
plan to roll this out some time in Q1 of 2018.
Now there is a complication here
with that many PC manufacturers have also announced
that they're gonna integrate Alexa
into Windows 10 on their laptops.
That's a separate issue.
Again, I'll talk about this in the other video
regarding the future of Cortana.
But yes, look forward to Cortana and Alexa,
no matter how clumsy it is, coming in the next few months.
That does it for this episode of Ask Dan.
Remember, if you have a question,
use #AskDanWindows on Twitter
or go to our forums at Windows Central
and ask me a question there.
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give us a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching.
Take care, everybody.
Is Cortana dying and Alexa going to rule the world?
Shit, now I'm thinking, pause for a sec.
This is kind of...
I'm just gonna give a brief answer here
'cause we have to do a whole separate video,
basically, on this topic,
but I'm just gonna reference I'm gonna do
a separate video talking about this.