News about Microsoft’s answer to Siri, the Cortana Digital Assistant leaked out last month. Voice by the inestimable Jen Taylor, Cortana is intended to be more than just a simple search engine bringing together information from different platforms such as Windows Phone, Windows and Xbox via Kinect 2.0. The service should arrive on US Xbox One consoles sometime during 2015, with other English speaking territories to follow over the 2015/16 window.
Today we’ve heard more by some leaks of information from the Software Development Kit (SDK) that is supporting the phone element of the Cortana “Shell”. Intended to move beyond the services offered by Siri, for example Cortana will look for information in your emails and track flight numbers that are mentioned there. The SDK suggests that Cortana will be available in Male and Female voices and in a range of languages, however given the information last month it will be interesting to see the time frame for those services becoming available. As another ambitious cloud based project, it seems likely that this will have the support of Satya Nadella, which takes all the data on various platforms and makes intelligent connections – all part of making Microsoft a “Do More” company.
Could this be the shape of phones to come?
We’ll have a long time to wait to see this, so I’d be surprised to see anything this year at E3 for example, but Spring 2015 might just be an interesting time. As for me, why on earth would you want to replace the delightful Jen Taylor’s voice…?
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