What Name Is Given to the Windows Phone 8.1 Virtual Assistant?

Technically, Cortana isn't supposed to exist for at least another 500 years, but that's not stopping Microsoft from bringing her to life this week. While Apple has Siri and Google has Google Now — both digital assistants that run on smartphones — Microsoft is taking an approach that mixes the best of the contest with its ain unique accept. Based on a 26th-century artificially intelligent character in the Halo video game series, Cortana will debut as part of Windows Phone eight.1, the next big update for Microsoft's mobile operating organisation.

Past learning your habits and interests continuously, Cortana is positioned as a personal digital assistant that helps you organize your solar day-to-solar day activities, aslope regular spider web searches for information. Cortana will deed as the primary way to discover and search for information on Windows Telephone 8.ane, or just an assistant to manage your meetings, reminders, and daily life. She's smart and witty, all while being designed to closely resemble a human banana. With the contest already years alee, Cortana arrives at a time when Microsoft is focused on catching up in mobile. Cortana is a pregnant new characteristic for Windows Phone 8.ane, one that has been in development for more than 2 years. In many means, Microsoft's assuming new mobile efforts rest on her virtual shoulders. This is the story of Cortana, and how she came to be.

The name started from a unproblematic suggestion from Windows Phone program manager Robert Howard in an early planning meeting. "It was only a codename, it stuck," explains Marcus Ash, group program director of Windows Phone. "We didn't intend for it to be the bodily product proper name from the first." The fact Cortana exists merely as Cortana, and not some marketing buzz similar "Microsoft Personal Digital Assistant Home Premium" is surprising given Microsoft's history of naming products. Up until a few weeks ago, it was striking and miss whether Cortana would be the terminal name. It could have been Naomi, Alyx, or a number of other suggestions, but leaks and a petition to use the Cortana name helped sway Microsoft'south decision.

The Cortana naming and background is linked directly to Halo, and meshes well with Microsoft'due south master goal for the production: recreate a real personal assistant without being also creepy. Cortana was always there for Main Chief in the Halo games, and now she's ever there for y'all on your telephone, simply but if you want her to be. Rival services like Google Now dig deep into information from devices, and while that's often useful it can besides be irritating in the grade of non-terminate notifications, or just scary that the system knows so much almost you. To avoid this, Microsoft spoke to a number of loftier-level personal assistants — yeah, actual humans — and found one that kept a notebook with all the key information and interests of the person they had to look later on.

Cortana has a notebook, just like a real banana

That elementary idea inspired Microsoft to create a virtual "Notebook" for Cortana which stores personal information and annihilation that'due south approved for Cortana to see and use. It'southward not a privacy control panel, per se, simply a list of everything Cortana knows about you. "Information technology's her view of yous, just clearly you can just snatch information technology from her at whatsoever time and say 'That'southward not correct, I don't want you to know this' or 'I'm non comfortable with you reading my e-mail,'" explains Ash. "So you take consummate command over what she knows and she'south transparent about it." Entries in the Notebook are stored in the cloud, and you can share contact information with it, besides as your interests, home and work locations, and more. The notion of Cortana acting as a personal assistant with a notebook— as opposed to a creepy stalker — has been drilled into the team from the showtime, they say. She likewise operates and functions by learning your habits and interests from your telephone use, location, and communications. You can speak to Cortana or just input text, just she'll e'er ask you lot earlier she stores whatever information she finds in her Notebook.

When yous first launch Cortana, she runs through basic questions to learn near y'all — your name, your nutrient preferences, what category of moving picture you like, and then on. After that, when the service is activated with Windows Phone's search push button, you tin swipe down to see a "proactive view" of information. It's very similar to Google Now'southward cards, with data on flights, sports results, stocks, and anything else Cortana has learned and jotted downward in her Notebook. Yous can ameliorate the Notebook past manually adding your personal interests, reminders, news, and other important information. It's actually a hub of data that turns into cards, and parts of it can be pinned as Live Tiles on the Get-go Screen or used to generate notifications in Windows Telephone 8.one'south new Activity Center, a notification hub similar to those found in iOS and Android. If, for case, your favorite football game team just scored, Cortana tin alert you. If you visit a foreign country you'll be greeted with weather data, currency conversions, and maps. If you're in a text or email bulletin, Cortana volition underline elements like "let's encounter at 8PM" to make it piece of cake to set reminders or calendar appointments.

One of the most useful features of Cortana is its power to trigger deportment based on events, a little bit like the popular spider web service IFTTT. For example, saying "Remind me the next time I call my wife that we need to talk near Kevin" will create a reminder that is triggered when you side by side become to phone call your wife or she calls you. It'south powerful, but Cortana even impresses during basic search queries. If yous search for "What's the all-time eating place near me" you won't get a large list of results like you practice with Siri, you'll get a single eating place that's rated the best in the area past Yelp users. "If you asked a real banana, 'What is the all-time restaurant' and she held a folio upward to you, you would fire her and try to find another i," jokes Rob Chambers, principal grouping program director of Bing. The difference is that if you had said "the best restaurants," plural, then yous'd get a listing thank you to Cortana'due south understanding of the voice queries and their context. The truly impressive moment is when you're merely able to say "call information technology" afterwards request for the all-time restaurant, or "give me directions" and Cortana understands you mean directions to the restaurant in your previous part of the query. It's truthful multistep search, a way to layer query upon query to achieve complex tasks by vocalisation lone. Information technology feels like the future.

In Windows Phone eight.1, Cortana appears equally little more an blithe circumvolve, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have a personality. Like whatever good assistant, and Apple's Siri, Cortana's personality shines through in daily utilise. Ask her, "Who's your father?" and Cortana will reply, "Technically speaking, that'd be Bill Gates. No large deal." Other queries produce witty responses, and some answers make the round character spring to life and animate with i of 16 emotions. Cortana won't always answer with emotion and animations, but Microsoft envisions a future where she reacts visually to sports scores or other events — any good assistant knows to be pumped when a football team wins and furious when they lose, and so does Cortana now. "There's only more than stuff we're gonna be able to do with the shape as we progress along this journey," explains Ash.

Microsoft has also worked closely with Halo developer 343 Industries on the eyelike visual elements and voice actress Jen Taylor for the sound of Cortana. Taylor is the voice behind Princess Peach, Toad, and Toadette in various Mario games, but she's best known for her role every bit Cortana in the Halo series. For Halo fans — and there are a lot of them — having Jen Taylor as the voice of Cortana in Windows Phone is a large deal, and for Microsoft it's as significant. "She's gonna play a pretty large part in how we roll this out and how nosotros evolve this speech technology," explains Ash. Initially, Taylor will be used primarily for what Microsoft calls "chit chat" responses, queries where the visitor can utilise original audio. If you ask "'What'due south up with Main Chief,'" or anything related to the Covenant, then you'll get a Taylor response. Other interactions, meanwhile, use a synthesized vox that'south like to Taylor's. (If yous want some more Halo-related fun with Cortana, you can just set your nickname as "Primary Main" in the settings.)

Voice actress Jen Taylor is the voice of Cortana

Microsoft didn't just magically build a digital assistant in 2 years — the visitor is leveraging investments in data gathering that information technology has been making for half a decade. Cortana relies on Bing's backend services for the majority of its features, and that'south backed up by thousands of servers crunching data in the background. Microsoft's Windows Phone team worked closely with engineers from Bing to bring Cortana to life. Just every bit Google At present is indelibly continued with its namesake search engine, it'due south impossible to imagine Cortana would ever exist without Bing.

I met with a number of the Bing architects behind Cortana, and it's clear they're excited to encounter their piece of work represented in a single product. While Microsoft is transforming Bing into a platform and service, it's typically viewed as merely some other search engine; Cortana, on the other hand, is a true showcase. Over the past several years, Microsoft's Bing engineers have been working on several services that play a crucial function in Cortana. Foundational technologies like natural language processing and the linking of real-world objects to web data are key, simply they were congenital without a specific end production in mind. If Bing is the house, Cortana is the shiny red sports car in the garage.

To glue all these bits of Bing together, Microsoft'due south Mike Calcagno, partner development director at Bing, joined the search side of Microsoft 18 months ago, and his get-go big project at Bing was Cortana. "My assessment of the approach when I got hither though is … someone needs to actually pull these services together in a way that'due south coherent," he says. "Everybody who was working on it had a fiddling Cortana doll, and we all put them in our office and when you walked around you saw like….'Oh….he's in, he has the Cortana doll.'"

This bond carried on throughout the Cortana project. The Bing squad spent so much personal time with the Windows Phone group that Cortana eventually thought Calcagno's work address was a local bar in Bellevue, Washington. "We merely really got along with that squad. Nosotros lived the project with those guys and really worked equally i team, and what came out of it actually is this first version of Cortana." You could phone call it a skillful example of the "One Microsoft" philosophy that sometime CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled before long before his departure, where teams work closely together instead of competing internally.

Cortana is the commencement big examination of a giant mind-meld between Bing services, and it'due south 1 reason Microsoft is placing a beta tag on the feature initially. The organisation needs to learn and ameliorate over fourth dimension, peculiarly on the voice recognition side, and Microsoft is only launching it in the US for now. In the days leading up to its unveiling, the team was still fixing bugs in the background. Bing chief program manager Vish Vadlamani recalls spending countless days working from 7AM until eleven:30PM on Satori — a self-learning organization that voraciously chews through thousands of gigabytes of content for Bing'southward indexes every twenty-four hours — and he'due south hopeful the work is actually going to pay off with Cortana's launch. "It's in some means exhilarating, and some ways scary," he admits.

Cortana would not exist without the power of Microsoft's Bing platform

"The vision behind what we're doing hither is that this intelligence can expand beyond Windows Phone," explains Bing director Stefan Weitz. But where exactly Microsoft will take Cortana in the future is withal largely a mystery. Third-party apps will be able to integrate with the service, allowing users to merely say, "Hulu, show me the latest episode of Modern Family" and the app volition launch with the latest episode, rather like the mode vox search works on Xbox. Combined with the reminders, it's an example of how useful and powerful speech is when information technology's done correct.

Microsoft has seen what Apple tree and Google have done, wrapping some of the best ideas from Siri and Google At present into one attractive, like shooting fish in a barrel-to-utilize interface — simply now, the real trick will exist to leverage Xbox, Windows, and Microsoft's other products to become Cortana everywhere. The Bing home page will be updated in the coming weeks with notifications and data displayed in Alive Tiles, personalized for each user, mayhap a small sign of things to come. The visitor has an always-on microphone in millions of houses through Kinect, hundreds of millions of computers running Windows, and a healthy new attitude toward iOS. For now, Cortana lives in your pocket, just her vocalism might soon be everywhere.

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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/2/5570866/cortana-windows-phone-8-1-digital-assistant

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