Reddit and UserVoice suggestions for Cortana

Redditor clang_ley has some suggestions for Cortana. On top of increased features/abilities, it’s about having a more natural conversational personal assistant.

http://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/2gcg1q/suggestions_for_cortana/

At the moment, there is a small degree of conversation that can be carried out and Cortana can remember a few things. A lot of these suggestions would sound even better when Cortana gets an ‘always listening’ activation option.

1. Reading texts. The answer is “Read it” or “Ignore”. What about other responses that say the same thing “sure” “go ahead”.  Or asking Cortana to read all messages.
2. It was mentioned in another suggestion piece but what if after a while, Cortana doesn’t ask you whether you want to read it, “yes or ignore” but since you’ve learnt the response, she just listens and waits if you say anything equivalent.
3. Asking Cortana to let you know about notifications
4. Increased politeness ‘niceties’. When asking Cortana how she is, clang suggests Cortana asking you back, “how about you?” and then potentially some contextual responses. I guess there has to be some level of customising with Cortana as all these question asking could get a bit too intrusive.
5. Play music – Cortana could ask you what kind of music. This could link in with something like mood dj to play something appropriate to how you’re feeling.
6. Contacts – being able to ask about facebook updates for particular contacts.
7. Suggestions: Reminding you to leave or if there’s a weather warning to ask if you want to know more. Cortana already does bleep for reminders, but yeah, she could say it out loud. This includes waking you up for alarms. Perhaps with that one, I’d rather have my own sound notification, but if that goes off for a while and I don’t respond, then Cortana could start asking me to wake up.
8. Other suggestions – when connecting to Car bluetooth, she could ask you “want me to put on some music?” or “want me to get to your appointment?”

It’s all really about being an intuitive, but not intrusive, personal assistant.

Other feature things, some from uservoice:

1. Answering calls, including instructions to tell someone if you’re busy, like it does with quiet hours. Cortana could even take a message and somehow relay that to you if you as a notification. I guess it would help to have audio recording as well incase Cortana misheard.
2. Speaking of which, I wish the automated message in quiet hours could be personalised.
3. Jen taylor options for all regions.
4. Interacting with what’s on screen, e.g. when looking at a picture “Cortana, send this picture to _____”
5. Knowing your birthday (and wish you happy birthday) and other people’s birthday when you ask.
6. Understanding context in reminders, so when you say “remind me to do my laundry” it will say “reminder to do your laundry”.
7. Geofencing settings. I remember having this option on the 7610 and later with that Symbian beta labs app.
8. Not a Cortana thing but it annoys me if you’ve given Cortana alarm reminders and WP has reached its alarm limit so Cortana can’t make you new reminders.

Category: Windows Phone