Gadgetory

hi I'm Cortana well well here she is I am thrilled for you all to now meet our truly personal digital assistant for Windows Phone and yes her name is cortana I want you to notice right there on the Start screen front and center right here I have a live tile for Cortana so of course Cortana has a live tile and you can see she's animating right there and there's a number of interests that I've already taught her about and the live tile is showing me this news and information so that's one way I might get to Cortana but Cortana also fully replaces the search function on Windows Phone so whenever you push the search button Cortana is there to help you do searches find information or get things done so I'm gonna go down here and touch the search button and there's Cortana and you can see she greets me she looks a little excited to see me here on stage and probably to see all of you she says what's on your mind and below that you see she's giving a bunch of suggestions for things that I might ask and these suggestions are actually personalized if you watch them sometimes she suggests things actually related to people that she knows about me people that she knows that I know and one of the nice things you could do here is I'll just touch this see more so you get an overview of all the kinds of things Cortana can do like a real personal assistant she's good at handling your communications in your calendar she can make phone calls or send texts or schedule appointments or take a note give you a reminder she's also good at learning helping you learn things she can do searches tell you what music is playing she knows the places you frequent and so on and so on so all of that is built right in now imagine you're in the dentist appointment at the desk and they want you to set up appointment well you can do this really easily put dentist appointment on my calendar for August first at 10:00 a.m. all right I'll add dentist appointment to your calendar for Friday August 1st at 10:00 a.m. sound good yep all right I've added it just so you know you have pick up Christina from airports at the same time uh-huh oh that's what you would expect from a personal assistant if there's a conflict you want them to tell you in fact I could say to Cortana please move an appointment and so on and and she can handle all those sorts of tasks so that gives you a sense of how she can help you be organized and get things done well as I said she's powered by Bing and knows the entire internet so she's pretty good at sort of searches and questions and those kinds of things so here I am in San Francisco I'm hoping to be to meet up with my family a little bit later and I'm gonna get a big group of people let's say and go out down in Palo Alto so this is the perfect kind of thing that Cortana can help me with show me the best Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto here are 10 Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto that are 4 stars now here's what's going on of course Cortana powered by Bing knows a lot about the Internet but remember Bing has relationships with lots of other great data feeds so in this case Yelp data helps Cortana identify four-star restaurants and that's what she's showing me here now because that data is present and because Cortana is sufficiently smart I can narrow my query in a really natural kind of way I'm gonna have a big group of people so I want to make reservations which ones take reservations here are the ones that are 4 stars and take reservations now one of the other things that we've added in to Cortana that is something we heard these personal assistants talk about a lot is the degree to which they help their clients with relationships with other people you know the the personal assistants knew that you had a meeting was so-and-so and they knew that the person had you know got promoted or was bummed out about something and so Appert real world personal assistant helps you with those relationships we thought well that's a perfect thing for Cortana to do as well in fact it's something that other digital assistants don't do so I want to show you a kind of reminder that only Cortana can do and these are people reminders so I'm going to keep myself out of trouble with my sister by remembering to talk to her about her new addition to her family next time I speak with my sister remind me to ask her about her new puppy alright next time you talk to Nancy exactly I can remind you to ask her about her new puppy sound good yep great now of course since this is a phone I might talk to my sister on the phone or I might have a chat string with her I might have an email conversation and in all those cases Cortana will now remind me when I'm in the context of talking to my sister to talk to her about her new puppy and of course that will make my sister feel much better about me as her brother okay I showed you a little earlier that as we're building up Cortana we are making her smarter and smarter on the service back-end but we're also inviting you all to participate with that as well and when people start talking to their phone in natural language we want to be able to use the natural language capabilities in the cloud to make your apps work better so if a user addresses an app by name and then says some text we're gonna parse that and get it to you so that good things happen let me show you some examples Skype get David Treadwell startings hi this is a new version of Skype that were updating for Windows Phone 8.1 and you can see here Skype has recognized David Treadwell and he's coming on the line here in the contact that I have said I'm not gonna actually make the call here on stage you get the general idea there are lots of other things that we're working on right now and we invite you all to participate as well let's say I'm at a party or I'm out and someone says have you seen the new show in this case deadbeats a new show on Hulu Oh a Joe you should watch that I don't want to have to navigate around and find stuff I want to really get to my apps quickly so I can now do that via talking to Cortana Hulu ad deadbeat to my cue opening Hulu Plus and so the app runs the service recognizes the data adding deadbeat to queue there it is deadbeat has been added to my queue using natural language and making that really convenient