Microsoft has released cortana a digital personal assistant. Here are the features:
Powered by Bing, Cortana is the only 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 and checking in with you before she assumes you’re interested in something. She detects and monitors the stuff you care about, looks out for you throughout the day, and helps filter out the noise so you can focus on what matters to you. Cortana will launch shortly here in the U.S. first as a “beta,” and then will launch in the US, the U.K. and China in the second half of 2014 with other countries to follow afterwards into 2015.
In Windows Phone 8.1, you get to Cortana by either a Live Tile on your Start screen or by pressing the search button on your device. This will take you to Cortana Home. To interact with Cortana, you can either speak or type—if you’re in a meeting, just type and Cortana won’t talk out loud. But if you ask her a spoken question, she’ll answer verbally and even carry on a natural conversation.
When you interact with Cortana for the VERY first time, she will start learning things about you… like your name, how to pronounce it, and ask for some personal interests.
Once she’s learned a bit about you, Cortana’s home populates with information that is curated just for you. You’ll see things like flight information she’s found from your email confirmations, weather, the latest news, and even traffic information once she learns your commute routine, such as from work and home.
Re: Cortana Windows phone digital personal assistant. What do you think of this?
So I got an HTC 8x and played around with it. Windows Phone 8.1 has come a long way from its lonely days and its very contemporary. I'd definitely recommend this over iPhones. Its got all the functionality, features and a very healthy choice of applications in its app store. Also, Microsoft has really developed its cloud offering so everything sync's very nicely. There's still some hiccups with Office 365 that maybe I'm not getting or things are just broken. For instance to change from my outlook.com account to an O365 account I needed to reset the phone.
The Surface Pro 2 (SPro2) also gave me a really good feeling. The sync between the phone and computer was very nicely done, including theme sync and Bing integration. Applications can seamlessly manage data using the OneDrive service. I'm going to spend some more time on Windows now and give my Mac's a little rest :).
let’s hope the apps are there by next year