Windows Phone 8.1 will offer users a great number of advancements like the ability to customize the background of Windows Phone Start screen, lock screen themes, an Action Center which allows you to see notifications from ANY app, a redesigned calendar app and more. But most important feature of this new update is Microsoft’s new voice assistant ‘Cortana”, which aims to rival Apple Siri and Google Now.
Inspired by the popular character from Halo video game, Coratana gets powered by Bing search to provide necessary answers to all user questions. Microsoft claims that Cortana is “the world’s first truly personal digital assistant, that gets to know you, builds a relationship that you can trust, and gets better over time by asking questions based on your behavior.”
Unlike Google Now, Cortana can’t be launched with a voice command from the home screen. You have to either get a tap on a Live tile or press the search button on your device to bring up the voice assistant. Similar to Google’s Now Cards, Cortana also has the ability to learn user behavior and show curated information for each user, including weather, the latest news, and even traffic information. Users will also have a chance to get their Cortana info on the web by signing into Bing.com with their Microsoft account.
Read Also: Is Microsoft Planning to Release a Version of Windows 8.1 for Free?
All these new features in Cortana may sound new and very interesting to Windows Phone users, but iOS and Android users have been using these services for years and it has gotten much better over the time. Since Cortana is still new, it may take a while to catch up to the level of Siri and Google Now, and it remains as the only worthy soldier to save the dying mobile OS that is Windows Phone. Check out the Microsoft intro video for a quick glance at Cortana.
[Via: Windows Blog / YouTube]
(All images, trademarks shown on this post are the property of their respective owners)
Follow @nrjperera - Roshan Jerad Perera
