New Competitor, Microsoft's Cortana

One of the biggest features of Apple's mobile OS is its voice recognition tool, Siri. Siri allows users to ask questions such as “are there any taco restaurants around” and will process the question and give the user an appropriate answer - we know the deal. Most impressively, Siri is good at understanding people's everyday language. Users can speak how they normally would to another person and Siri can interpret the meaning correctly or will ask questions to get a better understanding of what was asked. This is a demonstration of the recent technological advances in the area of speech recognition.

Since Siri has been so successful it is only natural for Apple's competitors to come with their own versions of personal assistants for their mobile products. The latest versions of Android software now comes equipped with Google Now, Google's very own intelligent personal assistant. Google Now comes as part of the Google Search application and can learn and adapt over time to a user's search habits. Now, Microsoft is set to soon join the voice recognition competition by releasing its  own personal assistant, currently known as Cortana.

The name Cortana stems from the popular Halo series on Microsoft's Xbox consoles. Cortana is a fictional AI character who feeds information to the main character. With Window's newest phone update Cortana will take the form of an animated circular icon which will change shape when speaking or processing information. Additionally, much like Google Now, Cortana will be capable of keeping track of user's previous search requests and use this information to better process requests in the future. Cortana will also attempt to learn a user's schedule and goals. Using this information it will then find and offer useful information to the user