Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore offered demos of Windows 10’s Cortana on stage, and he promised it will function like a “personal digital assistant.” Like on Windows Phone, it will remember things about the user in its Notebook, where users configure options.
Of course, Microsoft is promising that it won’t just be bringing the Windows Phone experience to PCs, but rather it is tweaking it to allow it to bring an optimal experience to the platform. Belfiore went on to demo some of Cortana’s functions on stage, saying, “Hey Cortana, show me PowerPoint slides about the charity auction.” It then searched through OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and the local drive to find the requested files.
Another demo showed off Cortana’s ability to detect some photo metadata and file types, making it possible to ask for photos from a certain month.
Cortana can also access dictation features. Users can tell it to send an email to someone, and then dictate the text. Dictation isn’t a new Windows feature, but doing it through Cortana could streamline the process a bit, and it will let users access it without minimizing what they are currently using.
Users can also interact with Cortana via their keyboard if voice commands aren’t their thing. The same search commands work, but it provides an alternate way to interact with the feature.
