Chapter 6

Hey, Cortana!

In This Chapter

arrow The Cortana backstory

arrow The deal with Cortana — you’re the product

arrow Teach Cortana to call you “Boss”

arrow How to blur Cortana’s memory

“ Hey, Cortana!”

“Yes, Boss.”

“Get me a double skinny latte.”

“I’ll bring it to you. Okay to charge your Amex four dollars and thirty seven cents?”

Cortana isn’t quite there yet. That was in my dream last night. In fact, if you try to order a double skinny latte in Windows 10, you get the response in Figure 6-1.

image

Figure 6-1: Baristas don’t have to worry about their jobs. Yet.

Cortana’s good, but she isn’t that good.

Launched on Windows Phone, Cortana is Microsoft’s digital-assistant answer to Apple’s Siri and Google’s “OK Google.”

Cortana, however, is a bit more refined: She (and I’ll relentlessly refer to her as “she”) is tied into all Windows 10 searches. That’s both good and bad, as I discuss later in this chapter.

She’s also lots of fun.

The Cortana Backstory

There aren’t many parts of Windows 10 that have a ...

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