Cortana is your intelligent personal smartphone assistant powered by Bing. She is ready to help you with your tasks and helps you manage your everyday life.
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Setting up Cortana for the first time
Cortana is available for Windows Phone 8.1 and in select regions/countries. To set up Cortana, you can tap the Tile on the Start screen or Press Search button. You can help her understand what’s important to you by answering a few questions. She sends speech data to Microsoft to provide improved personalized speech and speech recognition.
Features of Cortana:
Make calls, send texts etc
Cortana helps you to stay organized by helping you to make calls, send texts, set alarms and see what’s on your calendar.
Check the weather
You can check the forecast for today, tomorrow or the week.
Chat with Cortana
You can also talk to Cortana about whatever is on your mind. Chat with her like your new friend and tell her how you are feeling. She has opinions and stories to share.
Notebook
Cortana’s notebook keeps your interests, friends and favorite routines.
Play music
Cortana also helps you in playing local or streaming music. Just say, “Play” and she will do it for you. You can also say like, “Hey Cortana, let’s play some pop music.”
Add favorite places to Cortana
You can also add your favorite places to the app and can indicate traffic as one of your interests. Then, she will let you know when you should leave to be there on time.
Add reminders
Reminders work best when you get them exactly when you need them. She will remind you at specific time; about particular place etc. you can also designate some favorite places and use those nicknames to let Cortana remind you about something there.
Impressive Do-not disturb mode
Although every feature of Cortana is unique and exclusive, do-not-disturb mode is another impressive one. In this, you can specifiy “quiet hours”.
Miscellaneous features
- You can change the settings so that she calls you by your name or nickname.
- Cortana has an extensive library of Easter Eggs
- Most versions of the app take the form of two nested, animated circles.
- Answers questions using information from Bing such as current weather and traffic conditions, sports scores and biographies
- Cortana also integrates with Foursquare to provide you good recommendations about restaurants and local attraction.
Do you feel about using Cortana? Which are your favorite features? Share your views with us in the comments below.
