Microsoft showcases Cortana personal assistant for Windows Phone during Build conference

Shawn Knight

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microsoft cortana windows phone personal assistant

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled Cortana, the company’s own personal assistant for Windows Phone that’s powered by Bing. As we learned early last month, the service is named after the artificial intelligence character from the Halo franchise which should be familiar to fans of the series.

Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore drew the onstage assignment during the Build 2014 conference in San Francisco. It was there that he showed off many of the AI assistant’s capabilities such as setting reminders and responding to dynamic questions about topics like sports, weather and even search engine queries like calorie count in certain foods.

microsoft cortana windows phone personal assistant

Cortana is also capable of handling less formal, more social questions. For example, a user could have the personal assistant set a reminder to ask their friend about their new dog. And when they contact that person next, like by texting or a phone call, Cortana will trigger the reminder.

Much like Google Now, the service can also “learn” your behaviors and interests based on places you visit frequently and web searches you perform. This data is then used to try and provide you with contextually-sensitive information in a timely manner.

The user interface is simple and to the point: a circular icon that matches the color scheme you choose for your phone’s theme. It pulsates when it is speaking and rotates when looking for an answer to a question.

Cortana is currently in beta and not available to customers just yet. When it arrives in late April or early May, it’ll land in the US first before migrating to China and the UK.

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Who does that guy remind you/me off? Also Cortana... to be honest these "Personal Assistants" are pretty useless unless you can go "Cortana pause music"(for when your on spotify) or "Cortana Deny all calls until I say so"(Say when your writing a text or something so you can multitask without loosing any time)

If a "Personal Assistant" can do as I have just said say whilst I am doing another thing so I dont need cortana open to talk to it then I can say it is perfect but until then its absolutely useless.
 
Who does that guy remind you/me off? Also Cortana... to be honest these "Personal Assistants" are pretty useless unless you can go "Cortana pause music"(for when your on spotify) or "Cortana Deny all calls until I say so"(Say when your writing a text or something so you can multitask without loosing any time)

If a "Personal Assistant" can do as I have just said say whilst I am doing another thing so I dont need cortana open to talk to it then I can say it is perfect but until then its absolutely useless.

Yes and no. I agree it has limited use as a voice assistant unless it can be always listening (like the Kinect). But the idea of Cortana (akin to Google Now, I think) is to be an assistant in many aspects of the phone, like noticing flight information and letting you know about updates without you having to do anything at all. This is where these kinds of assistants can be useful.
 
Yes and no. I agree it has limited use as a voice assistant unless it can be always listening (like the Kinect). But the idea of Cortana (akin to Google Now, I think) is to be an assistant in many aspects of the phone, like noticing flight information and letting you know about updates without you having to do anything at all. This is where these kinds of assistants can be useful.

So like when you get a new text message?
 
Siri, Cortana. Well. Maybe a name I can say out loud not sounding like I'm trying to use voodoo or saying random geographical locations next time?
 
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