Cortana Will Be Microsoft’s Siri
Windows Phone 8 is Microsoft’s second generation of the Windows Phone mobile operating system. Windows Phone 8 was released almost two years ago, on October 29th 2012 and since its release Microsoft updated it with a few bug fixes and minor improvements, but it mostly remained the same, feature wise. However, the major update is coming as Windows Phone 8 will be succeeded by Windows Phone 8.1, which was already released as a preview to Windopws Phone 8 devs, this month on February 10. A recent leake with all the features of the upcoming update suggests that Windows Phone 8.1 might be just as good as Android or iOS. However, one of the most interesting additions that will debut with Windows Phone 8.1 is Microsoft’s own an intelligent personal assistant and its name is Cortana.
For those of you that don’t play video games, Cortana is a fictional artificially intelligent (AI) character in the Halo video game series. We got our first rumors about Cortana in 2013 when a Microsoft employee lost hist Windows Phone 8.1 smartphone. Cortana’s initial role will be to act as a search function; Windows Phone 8 smartphones come with Bing as the default search engine and it can be accessed through a special key on the device. As you imagine, Cortana will be more than just a search engine, just like Siri and Google Now. From recent rumors it seems that Microsoft intends to give Cortana her own personality, just like Apple did with Siri, being animated when speaking or thinking. Cortana will use Bing and Foursquare.
Cortana will integrate a feature that will allows users to choose exactly what they want to share with the intelligent personal assistant named after an AI from Halo; the feature’s name is Notebook. It will let users decide if Cortana can access the following: location data, behaviors, personal information, reminders, and contact information. The Notebook feature is basically intended to be a privacy setting so that as Cortana learns more about the user, it only stores in the Notebook what the users allow her to store. More than that, you will be able to edit or delete information from the Notebook whenever you like to. Just like Google Now, the information stored by Cortana in the Notebook will be used as a way to give it contextual awareness that will allow her to make suggestions, alerts and reminders.
We said above that Cortana will learn more about the user. This process will be similar to the one used by Google Now and Siri: as the user searches for things and uses his smartphone for various activities, Cortana will store the data and learn about the user’s preferences and habits. Cortana will then store what she learned in the Notebook and it will start reacting to emails or messages according to the user’s plans. Cortana can also offer contextual information on music, weather, appointments or directions based on what she knows or on the user’s location. Cortana is also rumored to be released with a Do Not Disturb feature similar to the one integrated with Siri; the feature will filter all incoming notifications in those times that you don’t want to be disturbed by any notification. Cortana will manage notifications by herself during the ‘quiet hours‘.
Cortana is set to make its debut with the upcoming major Windows Phone 8.1 update, but Microsoft will also implement the intelligent personal assistant in its Windows and XBOX devices; this move will help Cortana’s beta period. Microsoft is no stranger to voice recognition technology as it uses the tech in its recently released XBOX One; however, XBOX One’s voice recognition capabilities are a bit limited as the user needs to follow some patterns in order to issue commands, as opposed to Siri and Google Now which understand natural language. That is why for a certain period of time Cortana is expected to be in beta until Microsoft completes its voice recognition technology and adds more feature to its upcoming intelligent personal assistant. What are your thoughts on Microsoft’s upcoming intelligent personal assistant for Windows Phone 8.1?
