Last month, we announced the expansion of Windows Phone 8.1 with Cortana to China (nicknamed “Xiao Na”).  As you can read about here, the team did a tremendous amount of work to tailor the experience to ensure that Cortana felt intelligent and natural for Chinese speakers. Today we wanted to share some related work that was inspired by the question Alan Turing posed in 1950: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the...
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Today, people in the US with phones running Windows Phone 8.1 will have a new way to experience Foursquare recommendations.  Now, based on your location, Cortana will proactively showcase local recommendations from Foursquare on the Cortana home screen, along with your other interests. [To turn on the feature, pull up Cortana’s notebook go to Interests, look for “best nearby” and then toggle to ON] Cortana talks on your behalf to the Foursquare...
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Last week, we took the stage in San Francisco and proudly announced Cortana as part of the Windows Phone 8.1 update. You’ve likely already read about how Cortana will use the power of Bing to deliver personalized, natural experiences to users. What you may nothave read is how Cortana empowers application developers to deliver robust, natural experiences of their own. Windows Phone 8.0, our previous release, brought with it the Voice Commands...
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The world is a chaotic place. From the billions of Facebook updates made each day to the constant tick of stock quotes for the 3,571 companies listed on NASDAQ, there are trillions of pieces of information about the real world swirling out there every day. While there are plenty of apps and services that can help us manage what’s happening, we’re often left feeling buried by the weight of it all. Instead of feeling empowered, we feel...
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