Windows Phone is enriched by the arrival of Cortana, a voice assistant that promises to battle Siri and Google Now.
After much talk, the time has come for the official presentations: Microsoft – on the occasion of Build 2014 in San Francisco – has unveiled its project related to the voice assistant on smartphones.
It is indeed called – and as widely anticipated – Cortana and will be activated with the update to the Windows Phone 8.1 mobile operating system.
No need to beat around the bush: it is clear that this is a voice assistant system that enters into direct competition with Siri and Google Now.
Specifically, it is a system that, when queried by the device user, searches for the most relevant answers within the search engine’s framework Bing.
This is the virtual “place” from which Cortana draws, but Microsoft representatives Microsoft have pointed out that the voice assistant will gradually improve.
This will be possible because the Cortana project foresees the expansion of the range of answers as it will store users’ questions globally.
Cortana will therefore learn from the users themselves, expand its repertoire of requests, and provide additional search results.
Naturally, on a more “personal” level, Cortana will also scan the contact list, calendar, and smartphone functions to provide information on appointments, recurring events, email addresses, phone numbers, preferences, and so on.
The name was chosen by inspiration from the video game “Halo“, whose protagonist is a girl who actually embodies an evolved form of artificial intelligence: quite a fitting parallel, at least in the project’s intentions and basic premises.
To try Cortana we will have to wait a little longer: the beta test version will be released first in the United States, during the first week of May.
Only later Cortana will also arrive on terminals in the United Kingdom; after that, it will be the turn of Chinese users and then gradually the rest of the world, including Europe and Italy.
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