Cortana\u00c2\u00a0is a\u00c2\u00a0virtual assistant\u00c2\u00a0created by\u00c2\u00a0Microsoft\u00c2\u00a0for\u00c2\u00a0Windows 10,\u00c2\u00a0Windows 10 Mobile,\u00c2\u00a0Windows Phone 8.1,\u00c2\u00a0Invoke\u00c2\u00a0smart speaker,\u00c2\u00a0Microsoft Band,\u00c2\u00a0Surface Headphones,\u00c2\u00a0Xbox One,\u00c2\u00a0iOS,\u00c2\u00a0Android,\u00c2\u00a0Windows Mixed Reality, and\u00c2\u00a0Amazon Alexa.<\/p>\n
Cortana can set reminders, recognize natural voices without the requirement for keyboard input, and\u00c2\u00a0answer questions\u00c2\u00a0using information and web results from the Bing search engine.<\/p>\n
Cortana is currently available in\u00c2\u00a0English,\u00c2\u00a0Portuguese,\u00c2\u00a0French,\u00c2\u00a0German,\u00c2\u00a0Italian,\u00c2\u00a0Spanish,\u00c2\u00a0Chinese, and\u00c2\u00a0Japanese language\u00c2\u00a0editions, depending on the software platform and region in which it is used.<\/p>\n
Microsoft removed Cortana from Android and iOS on January 31, 2020. Not all markets will be affected by this change.\u00c2\u00a0The company has announced that Cortana services in the\u00c2\u00a0Microsoft Launcher\u00c2\u00a0on Android will be turned off by the end of April 2020.<\/p>\n
The development of Cortana started in 2009 in the Microsoft Speech products team with general manager Zig Serafin and Chief Scientist Larry Heck. Heck and Serafin established the vision, mission, and long-range plan for Microsoft’s digital personal assistant and they built a team with the expertise to create the initial prototypes for Cortana.\u00c2\u00a0Some of the key researchers in these early efforts included Microsoft Research researchers Dilek Hakkani-T\u00c3\u00bcr, Gokhan Tur,\u00c2\u00a0Andreas Stolcke, and\u00c2\u00a0Malcolm Slaney, research software developer Madhu Chinthakunta, and user experience designer Lisa Stifelman. To develop the Cortana digital assistant, the team interviewed human personal assistants. These interviews inspired a number of unique features in Cortana, including the assistant’s “notebook” feature. Originally\u00c2\u00a0Cortana\u00c2\u00a0was only meant to be a\u00c2\u00a0codename, but a petition on Windows Phone’s\u00c2\u00a0UserVoice\u00c2\u00a0site that proved to be popular made the codename official.<\/p>\n
In January 2015, Microsoft announced the availability of Cortana for\u00c2\u00a0Windows 10\u00c2\u00a0desktops and mobile devices as part of merging Windows Phone into the operating system at large.<\/p>\n
On May 26, 2015, Microsoft announced that Cortana would also be available on other mobile platforms. An\u00c2\u00a0Android\u00c2\u00a0release was set for July 2015, but an Android APK file containing Cortana was leaked ahead of its release. It was officially released, along with an iOS version, in December 2015.<\/p>\n
During\u00c2\u00a0E3\u00c2\u00a02015, Microsoft announced that Cortana would come to the\u00c2\u00a0Xbox One\u00c2\u00a0as part of a universally designed Windows 10 update for the console.<\/p>\n
Number of people with access to Cortana: 800 million in 2019. Number of questions asked: 18 billion since launch.<\/p>\n
Cortana can set reminders, recognize natural voice without the requirement for keyboard input, and answer questions using information from the\u00c2\u00a0Bing\u00c2\u00a0search engine\u00c2\u00a0(e.g., current weather and traffic conditions, sports scores, biographies).\u00c2\u00a0Searches using Windows 10 are only made with Microsoft\u00c2\u00a0Bing\u00c2\u00a0search engine and all links will open with\u00c2\u00a0Microsoft Edge,\u00c2\u00a0except when a screen reader such as Narrator is being used, where the links will open in Internet Explorer. Windows Phone 8.1’s universal Bing SmartSearch features are incorporated into Cortana, which replaces the previous Bing Search app which was activated when a user presses the “Search” button on their device.\u00c2\u00a0Cortana includes\u00c2\u00a0a music recognition\u00c2\u00a0service.\u00c2\u00a0Cortana can simulate rolling dice and flipping a coin.\u00c2\u00a0‘Cortana’s “Concert Watch” monitors Bing searches to determine which bands or musicians the user is interested in.\u00c2\u00a0It integrates with the\u00c2\u00a0Microsoft Band\u00c2\u00a0watch band for Windows Phone devices if connected via Bluetooth,\u00c2\u00a0it can make reminders and phone notifications.<\/p>\n
Since the\u00c2\u00a0Lumia Denim\u00c2\u00a0mobile phone series, launched in October 2014, active listening was added to Cortana, enabling it to be invoked with the phrase: “Hey Cortana”; it can then be controlled as usual.\u00c2\u00a0Some devices from the United Kingdom by\u00c2\u00a0O2\u00c2\u00a0have received the Lumia Denim update without the feature but this was later clarified as a bug and Microsoft has since fixed it.[51]<\/sup><\/p>\n Cortana integrates with services such as\u00c2\u00a0Foursquare\u00c2\u00a0to provide restaurant and local attraction recommendations and\u00c2\u00a0LIFX\u00c2\u00a0to control smart light bulbs.<\/p>\n Cortana stores personal information such as interests, location data, reminders, and contacts in the “Notebook”. It can draw upon and add to this data to learn a user’s specific patterns and behaviors. Users can view and specify what information is collected to allow some control over privacy, said to be “a level of control that goes beyond comparable assistants”.\u00c2\u00a0Users can delete information from the “Notebook”.<\/p>\n Cortana has a built-in system of reminders which for example can be associated with a specific contact; it will then remind the user when in communication with that contact, possibly at a specific time or when the phone is in a specific location.\u00c2\u00a0Originally these reminders were specific to the device Cortana was installed on, but since then Windows 10 Microsoft synchronizes reminders across devices.<\/p>\n Most versions of Cortana take the form of two nested, animated circles\u00c2\u00a0which are animated to indicate activities such as searching or talking. The main color scheme includes a black or white background and shades of blue for the respective circles.<\/p>\n Cortana on Windows mobile and Android is capable of capturing device\u00c2\u00a0notifications\u00c2\u00a0and sending them to a Windows 10 device. This allows a computer user to view notifications from their phone in the Windows 10\u00c2\u00a0Action Center. The feature was announced in early 2016 and released later in the year.<\/p>\n The above is a brief about Cortana. Watch this space for more updates on the latest trends in Technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cortana\u00c2\u00a0is a\u00c2\u00a0virtual assistant\u00c2\u00a0created by\u00c2\u00a0Microsoft\u00c2\u00a0for\u00c2\u00a0Windows 10,\u00c2\u00a0Windows<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1644,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[620,7,906],"tags":[621,18,907],"class_list":["post-1642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cortana","category-techtrends","category-visual-assistant","tag-cortana","tag-technology","tag-visual-assistant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1643,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions\/1643"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Notebook:<\/span><\/h4>\n
Reminders:<\/span><\/h4>\n
Design:<\/span><\/h4>\n
Phone notification syncing:<\/span><\/h4>\n