The Chinese announce a new Cortana tool for Windows 10 users

May 28, 2015 06:58 GMT  ·  By

Cortana will be available on Windows 10 PCs and smartphones, but if you're buying a Lenovo computer or tablet running this new operating system, you can get a personal assistant that's so smart it could freak you out.

Today Lenovo and Microsoft have announced a new feature called REACHit, which will be available on Windows 10 PCs and tablets released by the Chinese manufacturer and will work with Cortana to provide you with even more options than Redmond's personal assistant currently has to offer.

Cortana is already a smart assistant, right? Right. But with Lenovo's REACHit, Cortana is truly becoming part of your life because it can tell when you worked on a document, the modifications you made, who emailed you and what they said.

And what's even more out of this world is that REACHit will allow you to speak to Cortana just like to a human being, so there are no predefined voice commands, you just ask her what you want to know and she gives you the answer.

So, for example, if you're saying, “Hey, Cortana, I forgot what my wife told me to buy from the grocery store on my way back home,” the personal assistant could provide you with the shopping list your wife emailed to you a few hours before.

Feature lineup

REACHit allows Cortana to look for files and track modifications basically everywhere, not only on local drives but also on Google drive, Onedrive, Dropbox, and Box.

It will work on Lenovo PCs and tablets coming with Windows 10 and will support several email providers, including Gmail, Exchange, and IMAP, as well as calendar services such as Exchange, Outlook.com and Google Calendar.

REACHit is not yet available to users, but a private beta program will be started later this year in the United States and China, so if you want to be among the first to give it a try, provide your email on this page. Make sure you have a Lenovo device running Windows 10.

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