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Cortana will now remind you of the promises you made in emails

By Ng Chong Seng - on 10 Feb 2017, 9:54am

Cortana will now remind you of the promises you made in emails

One of the basic features of Cortana, the personal assistant that works across all Windows 10 devices and on other platforms such as Android and iOS, is to let you set reminders, be it associated with a contact, place, or time. The keyword here is “set”, which means an explicit action on your part. But humans are forgetful. What if you’ve wanted to set a reminder, but forgot to do it because you’re sidetracked by other worldly things along the way?

After much testing last year, Microsoft has today officially rolled out a new Cortana smart that will, in essence, remind you to set a reminder based on what you’ve said in your emails.

Here’s how it works. You give permission to Cortana to monitor the email services you use, and then go about using your email as you normally would. When you’ve made a written commitment in an email (e.g., you replied your colleague that you’d send her the budget slides by end of the week), using machine learning technology developed in partnership with Microsoft Research, Cortana will automatically recognize that promise, save the details, and proactively suggest a reminder to you to follow through at the right time. If you’ve mentioned a date, you’ll get a ping before it’s due and you’ll see it in the Action Center. Other suggested reminders will appear in the Cortana Home view. Once again, these are “suggested reminders”, which means you still need to act on them, such as marking the task as complete or, you know, save it as an actual reminder.

Cortana: ICYMI, this is the commitment you've made. (Image source: Microsoft.)

At the moment, Cortana’s suggested reminders are only available in the U.S. and on Windows 10, but support for iOS and Android are arriving in the “coming weeks”. You also have to use Microsoft’s email services like Outlook.com and Office 365, though Microsoft did say support for other email services is “coming soon”.

For those not comfortable with Cortana scanning your emails, it’s worth reminding that this feature can be turned off. Also, according to The Verge, this scanning is done locally (just like flight reminders) and no data is sent to Microsoft’s servers until you’ve actually created the reminder.

You've to give Cortana communications consent for suggested reminders to work. (Image source: Microsoft)

Source: Microsoft, The Verge.

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