Windows 10’s ‘Redstone’ update promises a smarter, Office-savvy Cortana

Cortana update will allow it to dive into individual apps and provide more context

Windows 10’s next major update, codenamed ‘Redstone’, promises a smarter Cortana that can work within Office applications. According to a report from The Verge, the personal assistant will become a contextual tool that appears within documents. It will facilitate transitioning tasks across the various smartphone platforms. Microsoft will also beef up the Notifications centre, according to the site.

If the Verge is correct, the continued enhancements to Cortana appear to be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. For example, it provides contextual information when you highlight a word or phrase in Microsoft Edge. It’s not clear how far its developer plans to go, but Cortana’s improvements could be as minimal as supplying that same sort of context in a Word or PowerPoint document. So far, that context is lacking from Microsoft Office

The digital assistant is one of Windows 10’s signature achievements, along with Universal Apps. Richness is a critical aspect of how Microsoft competes with Google Now and Apple’s Siri – the more sophisticated the digital assistant, the more useful it is. It seems likely that Microsoft will continue to embed Cortana deeply into its core apps – Mail, Calendar, Maps, Edge, and others – with a gap on third-party apps that it doesn’t directly control, such as Facebook