Cortana

A few weeks ago, I read about an interesting new offering from Microsoft called Hololens, an offering which enables you to interact with holograms which have been projected into the space around you, wherever that might be. See reference 1. In the margins it was explained that all this would come with Windows 10 which would also come with someone called Cortana, the Microsoft answer to Apple's Siri.

I can now report that Cortana has mysteriously arrived on my telephone. I have given permission for her to poke around in my telephonic affairs, told her about my favourite food & my favourite pastimes and we now await developments.

To get a taster I asked her to 'give me pi to 20 decimal places' and she generated a Bing query which gave me a site offering a million decimal places. I then asked 'do you come for free' and she got into a bit of a muddle. But there may have been method in her madness as she could leverage my response to the various interesting web sites that she did came up with. I then wondered, given that the PC I am typing on now is plugged into my Microsoft account, whether she can also see my emails, this despite the fact that they are Google rather than Microsoft? Do the permissions which I rather unthinkingly gave her cover that sort of thing? Or do I have to do email on my telephone to let her in? This not being something that I do in the ordinary course of events, with telephone being for text, and not very many of those. Perhaps I should send some emails containing some obscure words - perhaps the names of obscure plants - and see if she starts offering advice about them.

Google clearly knows all about her and offers all  kind of rather sexist images in blue, apparently targeting the sort of people who like computer games full of muscly people charging around in militarised swimming costumes.

BH, not best pleased that I have acquired yet another digital distraction, asked if she could have a male version. Memory so slack these days that I couldn't even remember whether or not that had been an option when I first opened her up.

Reference 1: http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us.

Reference 2: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/how-to/wp8/cortana/meet-cortana.