Apparently we're getting closer to the personal assistants from the movie Her. One of the bigger "features" they're touting is Cortana's personality, and the ability to "chit-chat" with her. She's also got a memory, so she'll remember if you've brought something up in the past, and be able to notice patterns or "predict your itinerary in the future". Sounds like they're still building on the memory and predictive sides of things, but I'm excited about the possibilities here, based on this first look

I'm not so sold on this one - voice based stuff is gimmicky at best and not overly useful, especially in public situations. Cortana seems like a stripped back version of Google Now to me, with far less useful features. I'm not sure Microsoft has the ecosystem to pull this off yet.

is the product actually ready yet? I thought they'd only shown demo videos thus far