Ever since Cortana was unveiled, even before the launch of Windows 10, there’s been a lot of talk about its features. It’s a useful program to use at home, but in the office it’s not always practical, because not everybody can talk to their computer at work. But, if you can, it can enhance your experience.

What Can Cortana Do?

Cortana is a useful digital assistant that will never allow you to forget an appointment or fall back on your work. Like Siri, Cortana can interact with you and the information you provide it, in order to supply you with specific answers that match your queries. For this, it needs to know everything about you. Or, if not everything, at least a lot. You can log your voice so that Cortana processes what you’re saying, your location (so that it can offer location-specific answers), your contacts (you can reference them and Cortana will know who you’re talking about), and much more.

You have options regarding its use, including turning it off. If that’s what you prefer, you can go to the Cortana search box, click the notebook icon and then Settings. Then to turn it off you just need to move the slider to the Off position. This means your information will stop being collected, but past data is still stored in the cloud. To remove that, go the Settings again and choose the option to manage what Cortana knows.

Benefits

Because Cortana gathers so much information about you, you can have it set reminders, provide you with the latest news, keep track of upcoming events you might have, and more.

And you don’t have to worry about speaking too soon and having the command cut off, as frequently happens in voice-activated programs on your phone. Cortana activates as soon as you start the sentence with ‘Hey, Cortana’, so it listens to everything that comes after that and you don’t need to press any button to turn it on. Text commands are also possible.

The search process is also much easier with Cortana, especially if you have a lot of files and don’t keep them very organised. By asking Cortana about documents you worked on yesterday, for example, or documents with the word ‘house’ in them, it brings up everything related to that search.

As professionals offering IT support in Barnet and London, we strive to provide top quality information to our clients, including the latest developments from Windows 10, to keep you up to date with the world of computing. If you still haven’t upgraded to Windows 10 and aren’t sure if you should (or how you can do it), that’s something Tristar IT can help with, so contact us or give us a call on 0844 939 0333.