The year 2019 has been good for Microsoft as the company announced new initiatives and updated their existing softwares with new features. Microsoft, however, didn’t talk about one thing as often as they should have and that’s Cortana. Announced back in 2014, Cortana has been Microsoft’s answer to Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa voice assistants.
This year, unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t talk much about Cortana and some speculated that the company might consider killing the service in the future. While we wish that’s not the case, a leaked video has confirmed that Microsoft indeed is working on Cortana even though the Redmond giant doesn’t talk about it on the stage. The video was posted by Microsoft Insider Walking Cat and it shows a bunch of upcoming features. Almost all the features in the video are geared towards businesses which might suggest that Microsoft is trying to target enterprise customers to use Cortana as their go-to personal assistant.
https://twitter.com/h0x0d/status/1189884639386767361
The video shows features like playing unread emails which makes Cortana read the emails to the user. The user can also respond back to Cortana asking it to flag or archive the email without unlocking the device. Not only that, but Microsoft will also allow users to choose the voice and the users will finally have a chance to have a male voice for Cortana. Another great feature shown in the video is scheduler which makes Cortana find a perfect time and date with the other person and email them the meeting details. Cortana can even find a place to meet if needed and notify the user about the meeting venue as well as the date and time.
We expect Microsoft to talk more about these features soon but it’s good to know that the company is actively developing Cortana to stay ahead of the fierce competition from Google, Apple and Amazon.