Microsoft’s Cortana scans emails to make sure users keep promises

PanARMENIAN.Net - Microsoft’s smart digital assistant — Cortana — is getting a handful of new features starting Monday, January 25, with those on the early-stage Windows Insider Program first to get a glimpse of the new tools, VentureBeat reports.

Cortana promises to get more intelligent over time, as it learns a user’s individual preferences, and it has been offering a range of location-based reminders for a while — so, for example, if you know you need to buy something for dinner, you can be alerted when you walk past the supermarket. Now, Microsoft is taking things a stage further by serving up reminders when you commit to do something in an email. It’s designed to help solve the perennial problem many face — overloaded inboxes and a tendency to “forget” promises made in email messages.

The feature is the result of work carried out with Microsoft Research (MSR), and it presumably uses natural language processing (NLP) to identify things you say you’ll do and a time-frame in which you commit to doing them. Cortana can then automatically remind you of this obligation through a pop-up message. So that pledge to your boss to get the end-of-year report “done by EOD” will become harder to forget.