In case you didn’t know, Microsoft announced that they would be bringing Cortana onto iOS and Android. As it stands, Cortana is available on Android as a beta and if you’re wondering how useful it is, you might be interested to learn that in the latest beta, Microsoft has activated the “Hey Cortana” feature.
For those unfamiliar, saying “Hey Cortana” to your phone will basically launch the voice assistant software without you having to open any apps. However there is a small limitation and that is your phone’s display needs to be on for it to work. This is versus Google Now in which users in any screen and even if the display is off can just say, “OK Google” and launch it.
However this is again dependent on the phone you have and whether or not it has an “always-listening” mode. We suppose this is not a huge inconvenience. In fact if anything, this actually helps make the app more useful since prior to this, the question of how integrated Cortana would be has come up in a debate as to whether or not it could potentially replace Google Now.
Last we heard, Cortana could replace Google Now as the default assistant, and now with “Hey Cortana” activated, it looks like the app just got more useful. There’s still no word on when Microsoft will officially release it, but for now it looks like things are progressing pretty nicely.
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