Keep Tabs on Cortana’s Ever-expanding Personality

I’ve used Siri and Google Now, but using Cortana since her release, it’s become clear to me that she’s the best personal assistant available right now. You’ve probably seen the commercials where Microsoft pits Cortana against Siri and succeeds in making Apple’s personal assistant look silly. I think some people dismiss ads like that and consider them nothing more than the latest cute kitten phenomena. After all, commercials are, in essence, TV shows that can be edited in any way to promote a vendor’s product in the best light. But, in the case of the Siri versus Cortana commercials, they are pretty much spot on.

Cortana is powered by Bing, which means that Microsoft can make changes on the backend so that Cortana’s personality and abilities can evolve overnight. But, with an ever-improving personal assistant, how can you keep tabs on new capabilities?

Since Cortana seems to understand just about any word or phrase you throw at her, say this:

“What’s new, Cortana?”

And, Cortana will present the following page:  What's new in Cortana

The page is new. Yesterday, Microsoft announced on the Windows blog that the page will be updated from time-to-time as Cortana grows and evolves.

This is a good thought, and a good first step, but truly, to fully utilize Cortana’s skills I’d like to see and hear Cortana just tell me her new capabilities. Still it’s valuable to register the new functions somewhere. The new What’s New page already shows some things you might not have been aware of, including: