Microsoft is bringing smartphone assistant Cortana to iOS and Android
Siri, you've got competition
Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing an advanced version of Cortana, its personal smartphone assistant, to iOS and Android.
Cortana has been running on Windows Phones for about a year now. It's Microsoft's own take on Apple's Siri, basically. And yes, the name is based on the AI character from the Halo series.
Cortana has speech recognition, searches the internet using Bing, and learns your interests.
This upcoming advanced version uses research from an artificial intelligence project called "Einstein."
Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, told Reuters that this enables Cortana to do even more. And that includes reading and understanding email, apparently.
This means that Cortana could tell you when to leave for a trip to the airport after realising you had planned a flight from reading your email.
It would do automatically this calculation by checking flight statuses, using your phone's GPS to track where you are, and also check traffic conditions.
It's all about managing space and time for you automatically. This is what the Einstein project was about. Hence it being named after the physicist who made great leaps in space and time theories.
No date on when Cortana will be coming to iOS and Android was given.
Reuters