Skip to main content

Cortana Gets Better at Helping You Manage Your Busy Schedule

Written By published January 25, 2016



When we first set out to build Cortana, we knew we had to build an indispensable personal assistant that truly makes your life easier. Whether at home or at work, we’ve built features that enable Cortana to help you get things done effortlessly. Use Cortana to request an Uber, assist with meeting prep, track flights or packages and set a location-based reminder that goes with you on all your devices.

As we look forward, we will continue to invest in areas that truly reflect the capabilities of a real-life assistant, like proactively reminding you about the things you have to do without you even asking, getting you to a meeting on time or helping to track and manage your calendar.

Today, I’m excited to announce new features that are beginning to roll out to the Windows Insider Program, and eventually all Windows 10 users, to deliver on our promise of helping you get more done throughout your day.

More Ways to Get Reminded

We know our users love Cortana’s location based reminders. Since launch, we’ve added inking abilities and brought Cortana cross-platform to give people even more ways to set and keep reminders. As we looked at places where Cortana could continue to make life easier, we wanted to focus on how we could make Cortana more proactive when it comes to reminders.

People often make promises to do things in email but may forget about them as the days go by and emails pile up. Microsoft Research (MSR) was pursuing an intriguing and powerful idea around this challenge—automatically recognizing when people make commitments to one another in email messages and providing reminders.  We collaborated very closely with MSR to bring this new ability to Cortana to help people better keep track of their commitments.

Helping you to keep tabs on your commitments is just one of the ways Cortana will get more proactive about managing your schedule.

Cortana on Windows 10 Gets Better at Helping You Manage Your Busy Schedule

Help Managing Your Calendar

We also want to make it easier for you to manage your calendar. Cortana, like a true personal assistant, is intelligent enough to understand how you may uniquely like to work – including the hours you like to set meetings and those in which you are most productive. So if you are a morning person like me, and you get a meeting request come through for 7pm, Cortana will alert you that you have a meeting outside of your regular times so that you can take action quickly to move it to a better time. The same for last minute meetings – say it’s 8pm and your boss has sent you an urgent meeting request for 7am the next day – Cortana will alert you that there’s a meeting that may need your attention, so you can adjust your alarm and morning routine accordingly and stay on top of your day**.

This is just the start of Cortana’s calendar management capabilities as we continue to refine Cortana’s intelligence and add new capabilities.

Cortana on Windows 10 Gets Better at Helping You Manage Your Busy Schedule

We’re incredibly excited about the possibilities with Cortana. As we look at what a real-life personal assistant can do, we know we’re just scratching the surface of how Cortana can help you be more productive. We look forward to bringing you more features and scenarios that help you to achieve more.

*Feature available in en-US only
**Feature available in en-US and en-GB only