Tap it, and Microsoft’s digital assistant appears. The Cortana icon appears at the top of the search box.Ĭortana, notifications, search: Those three items encompass the majority of the feature updates for the new build, but trying to separate them from one another doesn’t make sense-they go hand in hand.Ĭortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant, appears as a small search box at the bottom of the Desktop screen (or as a small circle icon, in touch mode), replacing the search bar and icon that appeared in earlier builds.
But deploying Cortana across phones and PCs helps tie that hardware together as Windows devices. The cross-pollination of Office on iOS and Android helps convince users to build their businesses on Windows. Why this matters: The most important statement of Microsoft’s two-hour presentation was spoken by chief executive Satya Nadella: “We are building services everywhere, but when it comes to Windows we are not building apps, we are harmonizing experiences,” he said.