Cortana

Cortana is an intelligent personal assistant created by Microsoft for Windows 10,

Windows 10 Mobile, Windows Phone 8.1 (where it now supersedes Bing
Mobile),[5] Microsoft Band, Xbox One,[6][7] iOS and Android.[8] Cortana was
demonstrated for the first time at the Microsoft BUILD Developer Conference
(April 2–4, 2014) in San Francisco.[1] It has been launched as a key ingredient of
Microsoft's planned "makeover" of the future operating systems for Windows
Phone and Windows.[5] It is named after Cortana,[9] a synthetic intelligence
character in Microsoft's Halo video game franchise originating in Bungie
folklore,[10] with Jen Taylor, the character's voice actress, returning to voice the
personal assistant's US-specific version.[11]

Cortana is currently available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish,

Chinese, and Japanese language editions, depending on the software platform and
region in which it is used (see the section on regions and languages for details).
Cortana mainly competes against assistants such as Apple's Siri and Google's
Google Now.

The development of Cortana started in 2009 in the Microsoft Speech products team
with General Manager Zig Serafin and Chief Scientist Larry Heck. Heck and
Serafin established the vision, mission, and long-range plan for Microsoft’s digital-
personal-assistant technology and they built a team with the expertise to create the
initial prototypes for Cortana.[12] To develop the Cortana digital assistant, the team
interviewed human personal assistants. These interviews inspired a number of
unique features in Cortana, including the assistant's "notebook" feature. Originally
Cortana was only meant to be a codename but a petition on Windows Phone's
UserVoice site that proved to be popular made the codename official.[13]