3. WHO‘S CORTANA?
• Personal digital assistant similar to Siri and Google Now
• Trying to combine the best of both
• Can be talked to or typed at
• Responds in the same way as addressed
• Replaces current Windows Phone Search completely
• Available from Windows Phone 8.1 on
4. CLOSER LOOK
• Cortana uses Bing and Satori to try and comply to your requests
• Understand and make sense of user’s words instead of
plain pattern matching
• Remembers user’s personal environment in a notebook
• User’s relations to other persons, preferences, habits
• Notebook is accessible and editable
• Tries to be pro-active, displaying information the user
probably wants
• Depends on time of day, location, calendar, reservations,
current events
5. DIFFERENTIATING FEATURES
• Claims of semantic understanding of user’s needs and the ability
to reason about them in a given context
• Example of a Lufthansa flight that Cortana suggested
to rebook because of an upcoming strike
• “Social triggers” – reminders can be set that not only trigger
on location or time but also when calling/texting a person
• “Remind me tell my wife about my new car”
• Third party app integration
• “Cortana SDK”
6. BEST OF BOTH?
• The voice processing is reported to be very good
• “Witty and smart” impersonation
• High search capabilities due to better integration to Bing and
its “back-end” Satori
• Predictive search
• Conversational search
• Subsequent questions are semantically linked to
“current” results
