Demoralized Cortana team push out new Scenes, Rules feature

Despite a major vote of no confidence from their CEO, the Cortana team has continued to work on improving their digital voice assistant.

The team has introduced two new features in the Connected Home section of the app – Scenes and Rules.

Scenes are a collection of settings bundled together under one name e.g. setting the lights to 30% and setting the thermostat to 20 degrees while at the same time closing the blinds. That scene may be called Movie Time for example.

Rules are more conditional settings like IFTTT e.g turn the light off of at 5 PM.

The feature appears to be rolling out widely and is available on all platforms Cortana is available on.

Neither Google or Alexa appears to natively support complex rule-based settings, and given that Cortana can manage many of the same devices Alexa and Google can, can our readers see themselves using Cortana just for this? Let us know below.

Via the WC