New Video Shows Microsoft “Assistant” Cortana In Action

Microsoft will be introducing its Siri and Google Now/Voice competitor Cortana with Windows 8.1 in April. The new “intelligent assistant” will eventually be available cross-platform, although launching on Lumia Phones.

The name Cortana comes from a character in the game Halo. It was originally thought that Cortana would look like her character in the game (see image right). However it now appears “she” won’t have a face or a body.

Cortana is intended to help users discover and search for information as well as providing Google Now like personalization and “predictive search” capabilities. The problem with the latter is that�Microsoft doesn’t have as much data as Google does to power anticipatory search and recommendations.

For that reason, upon set up, Cortana takes users through a battery of personalization questions.�The blog�UnleashThePhones posted a video (below) of Cortana in action.�Among the questions Cortana asks users are the following:

What are a couple of the most enjoyable parts of your everyday evenings?When you think about food, what�s most important to you these days?What are two of your main motivations for going out to an event/activity?

Microsoft is also licensing Foursquare location data to help further enrich the Cortana experience.

Reportedly behind Cortana will be sophisticated machine learning and Microsoft’s/Bing’s �Satori� technology. Cortana will supposedly�enable �deep personalization” of device experiences from mobile to the PC to Xbox.

However to be more than simply a “Siri impersonator” or “me too” product, Cortana will need to obviously outperform Siri and Google Now. That remains to be seen.

It appears that Cortana will in a way compete with Bing. It’s not clear however whether Cortana is intended to become the dominant UI for “search” on Microsoft devices or whether it will operate more like a Google Now product that includes Bing search but offers different use cases.

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