Microsoft’s mixed messages over Cortana continue. While the company is killing off the virtual assistant on some services and even promoting Amazon’s Alexa, it continues to gain new features. The latest is to provide contextual responses to the assistant.
Cortana has always been among the best virtual assistants for listening to and engaging in human-like conversations. WindowsLatest reports a new Microsoft Patent that would allow the assistant to remember previous answers.
Titled “PROVIDING EMOTIONAL CARE IN A SESSION”, the patent describes how Cortana will remember user responses, her own answers, and provide more emotion-driven experience.
More importantly, Cortana may also get better at responding to your feeling by creating a user profile that would have information on your emotion.
“A user profile of the user may be obtained. A first group of textual descriptions may be generated from the first group of images based at least on emotion information in the user profile. A first memory record may be created based at least on the first group of images and the first group of textual descriptions,” the patent explains.
Cortana Changes
Microsoft recently updated the UI design of Cortana. Microsoft has been using this design in the Cortana beta that arrived on the Microsoft Store recently. This means Cortana is now separated from Windows 10 overall.
Microsoft decided to transform the service into productivity assistant. While that may be different/deeper integration in Windows 10, on Xbox One (a fully consumer-focused platform), resulting in the assistant’s removal from the console this month.
Even on Windows, Cortana will no longer be a big part of the consumer experience and has already been separated from Search. The company announced a partnership with Amazon that integrated Alexa into Cortana and vice versa.
Microsoft started adopting Alexa across its services. That evolution was felt more on Xbox One than anywhere else. Last June, Microsoft brought Alexa and Google Assistant support to the console. This placed the two leading voice assistants in direct conflict with its own service on Xbox.
