From flight tracking to predicting sporting events, Microsoft’s digital assistant is steadily gaining features. No longer just a calendar invite fetching, reminder notifying, voice to text assistant, Cortana has come a long way in a short period. Adopting, impersonations, singing songs, telling jokes and predicting the outcome of socialized events, Cortana has also developed beyond finite data aggregation.
On top of the various user-friendly engagements Cortana host, users can now be delighted in the digital assistants latest feature. Users are reporting the presence of Cortana’s “Play the movie game,” addition. To help pass the time users can now ask Cortana to “Play the movie game”, and the digital assistant will respond with a question and answer dialog. Once prompted, Cortana will ask users to guess the film it is thinking based on three clues it provides. The clues are prompted one after another, users can opt to solve the riddle immediately or gain more insight by selecting through the clues by saying ‘next.’
Unlike its featured Notebook option, the questions, clues, and answers are not saved or recorded. Users may end up seeing several options or references multiple times. While information is key to Cortana’s usefulness, engaging users with mindless interactions may be the addition needed to push smartphone digital assistance into mainstream usage. Perhaps, transforming digital assistants into gamified helpers could garner Cortana the same level of attention by casual users as fitness bands and services did for health tracking.
Further reading: Assistant, Cortana, Digital, Microsoft, Windows, Windows Phone
