With the release of Windows Phone 8.1 we also introduced Cortana - the world’s first truly personal digital assistant.
As most of the others who are testing right now Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview, I also started first asking her funny questions like “Cortana what is the meaning of life” or “Cortana tell me a joke” but shortly after I really wanted to challenge Cortana and see how she can help me to improve my day to day productivity.
Alarms:
You are about to fall asleep but you still need to pick up your phone, unlock it and setup an alarm for tomorrow morning. Don’t worry Master Chief. Cortana is now there and you can just ask herto setup an alarm and she will take care of it.
Time to Drive:
One of the coolest things i have noticed while working with Cortana is how I get a notification in the morning visualizing the road between my apartment and the office. what really impressed me is the advise cortana gave me on when should I leave to be there on time
Calendar:
I got very often a pretty full meeting agenda. Follow-Ups, Sync-Up calls, bi-weekly meetings and so on. Now rather than me checking out each of my meetings one by one I can just ask Cortana about my upcoming schedule. Cortana even understands when you ask to schedule, reschedule or cancel meeting requests.
Reminders:
Have you ever been in a situation where you really needed to be sure that you don’t forget something when going from one office to the other? Or even when you were about to hit home after a very long day? Forget about writing notebooks or into any specific app. Cortana can do that now for you. Just tell her that she should remind you to do a certain task. It even understands requests like “Remind me when I’m near XYZ to buy XYZ”.
Lync:
The Lync 2013 App for Windows Phone and Cortana are already very good friends. Cortana can process commands like “Lync join current meeting”, “Lync show current meeting” and even “Lync play voice mail”. This in particular reduces for me the time I need in order to open the App myself and click or swipe through the different areas of it.
After a tough day at work and loads of meetings what is better than finding the closest barista? Well Cortana knows exactly not only where the barista is hiding, but also can give me directions on how to get there.
Overall:
Cortana is in fact a real personal digital assistant and helps me with my everyday tasks. The above mentioned capabilities are really just a small subset of what Cortana is capable of. You can clearly see from the way Cortana interacts with the Windows Phone user that it is powered by Bing.