Cloud Computing: How Microsoft’s Cortana will take digital personal assistants to the next level

Grazed from ArsTechnica.  Author: Sean Gallagher.

When Microsoft unveiled its Cortana “digital personal assistant” technology this week, some dismissed it as a far-too-late answer to Apple’s Siri and Google Now. But aside from a female voice and some functional overlap, Cortana is not strictly an answer to either of those voice-based tools—it is an answer to broader questions about how to wield the power of cloud computing services in a personal, non-intrusive way.

Cortana is just the first big pay-off from Microsoft’s continuing investment in the Bing platform as well as a host of big-data technologies that could have wide-ranging impact on how people interact with information, applications, and the world around them…


Microsoft clearly has plans for Cortana that go far beyond Windows Phone. At Build, Microsoft executives showed how some of Cortana’s personalization features can be exposed in Bing itself, and it seems almost inevitable that they’ll also be plugged into the Windows, Office 365, and Azure platforms. Bing’s search APIs are already used by Siri, and given the way Cortana was built—a relatively thin client application exploiting local device interfaces, backed by a massive amount of cloud computing power—components of the system could easily find their way into applications for other devices, including those running iOS and Android…

Read more from the source @ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/how-microsofts-cortana-will-take-digital-personal-assistants-to-the-next-level/