Microsoft is introducing a personal digital assistant (yes, like Apple’s Siri, and kinda like Google Now) for Windows Phone. Named Cortana, after the fictional artificially intelligent character in Halo, the digital assistant will be powered by Bing. 

To interact with Cortana, users can either speak or type. When users first interact with Cortana, ‘she’ will start learning things about you, says Microsoft, like names, and their best pronunciations, as well as personal interests. Cortana’s home populates with customized user information, and can feature flight information, weather, news, and traffic details, among other things.

This is what Microsoft has to say about Cortana:

Cortana is the only digital assistant that gets to know you, builds a relationship that you can trust, and gets better over time by asking questions based on your behavior and checking in with you before she assumes you’re interested in something. She detects and monitors the stuff you care about, looks out for you throughout the day, and helps filter out the noise so you can focus on what matters to you.

Cortana will be available in U.S. as a beta version, and will subsequently launch in the U.K. and China in the second half of 2014, with other countries to follow afterwards into 2015.

[Image courtesy: Microsoft]