A digital assistant helps people get things done. That's the
defined value add that digital assistant will bring. But it also provides a
personal understanding; I wouldn't go so far as to say companionship, but a lot
of fun. We are a group of writers that is fortunate to be able to write for
Cortana, the digital assistant. We get to write what Cortana says, and in doing
so develop who Cortana is. We call that the personality of Cortana.
You'd never know. When I first started working on Cortana, I
was working on Windows Phone, and it was one of the features that was going to
ship with Windows phone. We had a style guide, a set of principles that we use
to figure out how we would write for the phone UI and for content. I realized
pretty quickly that those same principles were not gonna work for writing for
Cortana because Cortana is in dialogue with you, you're going back and forth.
We had already established, at this point, that Cortana would be based on this
notion of a personal assistant, and that was how we were developing some of the
features too. So, I offered to go, put together some principles, just for
writing for Cortana. I started with this idea of the personal assistant and
built from there. We wanted to develop a personality for Cortana that felt great.
That felt like a device or a piece of technology that you really wanted to
interact with. We wanted her to not just help the user execute a task, but also
to do it in a supportive and helpful way that felt really friendly.
So Cortana's early users actually had a huge hand in
developing and helping develop her personality. People were very curious about
her. They wanted to hear about her likes and dislikes and preferences and
things like that. So now, she likes waffles. She has ideas about things. She
has opinions and that's something that users wanted from her. They wanted a
consistent firm personality. So that's what we gave them. So, one reason that
my team exists is to make sure that Cortana's responses are empathetic and that
they sound truly human. As writers, one of the things we do is work with design
and engineering leads on articulations of the future and what Cortana might
look like three years from now, five years from now. In the future, further on
down the road, Cortana won't just be your digital assistant, she'll be a
digital agent that helps you solve problems, acts on your behalf and augments
your abilities and reflects who you are. She'll also serve as your natural
language conversational interface between you and the entire digital world, and
hopefully, you can delegate things to Cortana.
This should free us up to spend less time looking at
screens, more time interacting with each other and concentrating on what we
love to do. The point of it all is to make life easier for people. We've
created this experience we call Cortana and she's personal and relevant, and
she can handle some of the busy work for you. Some of the things in life that
might get away from you. Check it out. Try some of these commands. Try setting
a reminder. Check the traffic out. Ask her to tell you something funny,
something interesting. In the end, I hope, the entire team hopes, that Cortana
can make your life a little bit easier.
