After six months of working on Cortana for iOS Microsoft has launched public testing of voice assistant for the iPhone. To participate in the testing technology can all owners of iOS devices in the U.S. and China.
The preview version of Cortana is able to create reminders, send emails, schedule meetings and store them in calendar. The assistant will also try to answer the questions, but some of the functions like Wake on command “Hey, Cortana” is still only supported in operating systems of family Windows.
It should be noted that Cortana on the iPhone and iPad will not run on the operating system level and even more to replace Siri. It’s a separate app with a built-in personal assistant.
In an accompanying article, Microsoft indicates that it is very proud of the work and wants Cortana to “advanced technology could try everyone” and not just Windows users 10. At the moment, the company from Redmond are only interested in people of the two countries are also participants of the program Windows Insider. When the version of Cortana for iOS will be available to all iPhone owners, is still unknown.
It is also not clear when Microsoft is going to add support for Russian language. Cortana in Russian is not available even for Windows users.
In late October, a group of researchers from the University of Utah and the AAA Foundation for traffic safety found that voice assistants on smartphones and computer systems in vehicles can distract the driver from driving until 27 seconds after the set of messages that are transferred or music selection. And voice assistant Cortana was more dangerous for driving than Siri.
