Cortana, Microsoft’s own take on a virtual personal assistant, is all set to be revealed at the //build/ developer event today in San Francisco. While we still haven’t heard anything straight from Microsoft regarding Cortana yet, it’s own property, Bing, which will power Cortana, now has references to the long awaited assistant. Cortana has been rumoured to be like Apple’s Siri and Google Now combined, with it offering personalized results, recommendations and more, apart from setting your alarms, reminders etc like Siri.
Inside the Bing personalization settings page, we are presented with renewed options with respect to search options. If the image above is not clear enough, here is the text inside –
Clear personal info
When you’re signed into your Microsoft account, Microsoft services like Cortana, Bing Apps, and Bing services personalize your experience. This personalization will be impacted when you clear the information below and will be reflected on all devices where you have authenticated with your Microsoft account.
Interests
This will clear your saved favorites and interests in Cortana and related Bing apps and services.
Other Cortana data
To provide personalized recommendations, we upload some info from your Windows Phone, such as your calendar, contacts, location, and browsing history. If you clear this info, Microsoft may be temporarily unable to provide these recommendations.
As you can see above, this confirms that there is some degree of personalization to Cortana, which will definitely change with each person. Also interesting to see is that these services will gauge your interests. While that’s normal for a search engine, we are not sure how that will be done using Cortana(may be Foursquare data can help), apart from getting information from your calendar, contacts, location and browsing history. We are going to stop here, because there is obviously a lot more to Cortana than this. Surely, Cortana nicely ties in with Mr. Nadella’s “Mobile-first, Cloud-first” strategy. How else can Cortana be described? Anyways, stay tuned as we bring you more information from the Build developer event tonight.
via NokiaPoweruser