Microsoft: Cortana voice assistant will soon help you stay in shape

Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant, now has 133 million active users, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed on Monday during the Microsoft Ignition Conference.

The India-born chief executive said during his keynote at Microsoft’s (MSFT) annual Ignite conference that Cortana has 133 million people across 115 countries using it regularly. Even more impressive, those users have asked 12 billion questions since Cortana’s launch in 2015 alongside Windows 10.

“Cortana is more than just a voice assistant,” said Laura Jones, a Microsoft senior marketing product manager.

Jones pointed to Cortana’s current slew of features, including voice-to-text, managing events and alarms, and retrieving basic information via Bing like the height of a certain celebrity, what day a specific holiday falls and who the CEO of a particular company is.

But Jones said Cortana is poised to do much more, thanks to machine learning. In other words, Cortana will eventually get smarter and become more useful to you as time goes on. The digital assistant will soon pick out commitments you’ve made in email, sometimes recap an event or proactively remind you about a commitment you’ve made.

Also coming down the pike soon for Cortana: “health insights,” which will combine data about your physical activity and sleep patterns with your schedule and daily routine.

“If I’m going to miss a workout this week because I’m going on a trip, I’ll get a prompt for when I can reschedule my fitness routine,” Jones explained.

Cortana was just one aspect Microsoft’s larger artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. As Nadella said during his keynote, “We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games.”

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