Ask her for the answer to a fact, and she’ll respond. Cortana appears to be able to search for a variety of files, from documents to settings to music, among others.Īnd, of course, Cortana can respond intelligently as well. Search for “sales,” and Windows 10 will return your documents with “sales” in the title. What this means is simple enough: Either type or say your query, and Cortana will respond appropriately.
(It also appears that Cortana is quite loyal: The assistant responded naturally to a Microsoft employee, but repeatedly failed to respond when I said the same phrase.)Ĭortana can now search for a wide variety of different file types.Īs expected in our preview story, Cortana is now the search interface for Windows 10 as well as a digital assistant.
But you don’t even have to do that: Active listening can be turned on, so you can simply say the trigger phrase “Hey Cortana!” and begin your query. Tap it, and Microsoft’s digital assistant appears. The Cortana icon appears at the top of the search box.Ĭortana, notifications, search: Those three items encompass the majority of the feature updates for the new build, but trying to separate them from one another doesn’t make sense-they go hand in hand.Ĭortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant, appears as a small search box at the bottom of the Desktop screen (or as a small circle icon, in touch mode), replacing the search bar and icon that appeared in earlier builds. But deploying Cortana across phones and PCs helps tie that hardware together as Windows devices.
The cross-pollination of Office on iOS and Android helps convince users to build their businesses on Windows.
Why this matters: The most important statement of Microsoft’s two-hour presentation was spoken by chief executive Satya Nadella: “We are building services everywhere, but when it comes to Windows we are not building apps, we are harmonizing experiences,” he said.