Microsoft’s CEO was left with egg, or rather milk, on his face at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco when the company’s digital assistant Cortana couldn’t make out what he was saying. The crowd seemed to find it amusing, and Nadella took it well, but an upset like this is not at all good for Microsoft’s so far promising campaign to promote Windows 10. However, it seems people are putting the blame on the man, not the machine.

Nadella asks Cortana, “Show me my most at-risk opportunities.”

But Cortana has trouble understanding the CEO it seems, interpreting his voice command as, “Show me to buy milk at this opportunity.”

“No, that’s not what I want,” says Nadella. The crowd laughs and claps. “Let’s try it again,” says Nadella, and delivers his voice command slowly.

“Uh, come on,” Nadella says when Cortana fails to understand him again and opens up his reminders.

“One last time, let’s try,” says a flustered Nadella, only to give up and tell his audience that, “This is not gonna work.” Although it must have been somewhat embarrassing Nadella does at least seem to see the funny side of it by laughing.

What’s just as amusing are the YouTube comments, which not surprisingly are focused on the gaff and not the remaining 30-plus minutes of the video. Many netizens seem to believe that it was Nadella’s Indian accent that was to blame, and not Cortana. Here are some digs at Nadella and Microsoft’s hard-of-hearing digital assistant.

“’Woozing a moosheen to welp wo wif da bess wisk wopotuneady’… How does he expect a machine to understand that accent?  Even Siri would tell him about the weather instead.”

“I have no idea what he was saying. So how could a computer.”

“Wow, poor Cortana.”

“Not even I understood what Satya was trying to say. I’m sure it works alright for people with less confusing accents.”

“MS didn’t show up with its game face. Looks like they should have done a few more dry runs with Satya and Cortana before prime time. Still, Cortana has a lot of potential.”

Photo credit: Guy Montag via Flickr