Cortana can help you do things on your PC by asking questions. With each update, Microsoft adds new features and options to Cortana, making it somewhat useful. I’ve kind of gotten used to asking Cortana random questions, so I don’t have to remember every single thing I want to ask her.
Cortana is a voice assistant that can be used on your computer to do things like play music, answer questions, and control your home environment. It’s not as powerful as Google or Siri, but it’s growing faster and has more features. If you want to use Cortana for more tasks than just talking to it, there are some ways you can do that.
How to Enable Cortana
You can control how Cortana works, including whether or not she listens to your voice and responds to questions. You can also adjust her settings so that she’s more like a personal assistant, or less.
The first step to using Cortana is to make sure you have a microphone installed on your computer. If you don’t have a microphone, Cortana still works, but it’s not as useful without the voice controls. ..
If you click on Get Started, it will try to detect your microphone and then go through a wizard to check the volume and make sure the mic is working properly. Once you have done that, you can start enabling the other options listed. The first one is Hey Cortana, which will allow you to simply say Hey Cortana and then start asking a question. Pretty much the same as Hey, Siri.
When you enable this feature, it’ll ask you to turn on speech recognition, which will send your voice input to Microsoft to improve their speech systems. Obviously, if you don’t like your voice commands being sent to Microsoft, you can simply choose Maybe Later. You definitely do give up some privacy when you enable Cortana because it wants to access your voice history, location, email, calendar and lots of other things. You can turn these on or off individually and I’ll show you how.
The Cortana feature on your device can prevent it from sleeping by default, so that it can hear you say “Hey Cortana” whenever you want. It can also respond to anyone or try to respond to just you. The lock screen option will give you Cortana tips even when the device is locked, and you can uncheck that box if you like.
You can enable a keyboard shortcut to access Cortana rather than having to say Hey Cortana. You can also download Cortana on your Android or iOS device and have notifications synced between the devices.
To enable device history and search history, you can choose to either turn them on or off. This will keep track of all your searches, etc., so you can easily access them if you need to.
To see what permissions your account has, click on the Permissions link. You’ll see a list of all the permissions your account has, as well as a list of people who have access to those permissions. ..
You can set all these other options later, but first click on Permissions. Here you can turn on or off permissions for location, contacts/email/calendar, and browsing history.
The bottom of the device has a few settings that you can change if you want to clear your data or get rid of Cortana. If you don’t enable location, Cortana won’t really work. I had to enable it in order to get the home screen populated.
The home screen will basically load up with popular stories, top news, local weather, and tips and tricks. I suggest scrolling down to tips and tricks and clicking on See more tips. This will give you a good idea of all the things that Cortana can do. ..
Cortana is a search box that will show up over your entire screen when you type in a search. It is very helpful because I usually don’t like to talk to my phone when I’m not at home, but my computer is always used at home so it removes the awkwardness. Give it a try and see what you think. You can always turn it off later.
