Use Cortana, Microsoft's personal assistant - Windows 10

Windows 10 - Use Cortana, Microsoft's personal assistant

Cortana is Microsoft's digital assistant that helps you with various tasks. Think of her like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Google Assistant but baked into Windows 10.

You likely were asked if you wanted to enable Cortana when you set up Windows 10 for the first time. If not, here's how to get started:

1. Activate Cortana by tapping or clicking Start | Cortana.

2. Select Use Cortana. Click Yes if you want speech, inking (support for a digital pen) and typing personalization turned on. This helps Cortana get to know you better and can help her complete various tasks. You also can choose No thanks if you don't want this feature turned on.

3. Cortana now sits on your task bar at the bottom of your screen. You can wake her up by saying “Hey, Cortana,” if you enabled that or by clicking the Cortana icon on the taskbar, which looks like a circle, and is to the right of the search window.

After you've awakened her, try asking, “What can you do?"

Cortana can help manage your calendar and keep your schedule up to date, join a meeting in Microsoft Teams or find out who your next meeting is with, create and manage lists, set reminders and alarms, and find facts, definitions and other information.

Be aware: Cortana asks for permissions to track your activity so it can be useful, and Microsoft makes it difficult to totally disable Cortana once you've enabled it. So be sure you don't mind that tracking.