Using a voice assistant while you’re on the phone doesn’t make a lot of sense, right? After all you’re talking to someone so how would the voice assistant differentiate what you’re saying to a friend or whether or not you’re issuing a voice command? However Microsoft envisions a future where you could one day talk on the phone and use Cortana at the same time.
So how does this work? Basically this is according to a recently published patent in which Microsoft details how someone in the middle of a phone call could launch Cortana and use it to perform certain tasks. However according to the patent, it seems that the tasks that one can do will be limited.
For example when talking on the phone with someone about a specific game, Cortana could be activated in which the website for the game can be launched to provide more information, so if the other person is clueless about the game they will be able to look it up while on the phone so that they can continue the conversation.
The patent also describes how this can work when not on the phone and if you are using the phone to browsing the web, watching YouTube, listening to music, and so on, where Cortana could launch websites and read it out to you while you do something else. Since this is a patent there’s no telling if it will be implemented, but with Microsoft’s rumored Surface Phone in the works, perhaps this could be one of the handset’s new features?