The company is working to bring its digital assistant on the desktop

Jul 11, 2014 07:18 GMT  ·  By

Cortana was presented with much fanfare earlier this year and there are signs coming from Redmond that Microsoft is working to bring its personal assistant on tablets and PCs running the full version of Windows.

While Microsoft has never clearly said that Cortana is coming to the desktop, it appears that the company was thinking about such a version of the technology even before bringing the full build of Windows 8 to the market.

UberGizmo has come across a video published on the official page of Microsoft Research that shows Louise, Cortana's first “incarnation” that came out of Redmond, running on a Windows 8 tablet. The video is dated February 2011, which is more than one year before the company officially launched Windows 8 to the market.

As you can see for yourselves in the video, Louise had pretty much the same powers on a tablet as on the Windows Phone, with its options easily accessible by swiping down from the top of the screen.

“Project Louise is an ongoing, multiyear prototyping effort to build an automated personal assistant. This demo highlights the Louise Personal Assistant serving as a conversational natural user interface (NUI): multi-modal speech+touch. This prototype was created by Madhu Chinthakunta, Savas Parastatidis, Lisa Stifelman, Jacob Miller, and Octavia Petrovici in the Conversational Systems Lab led by Larry Heck,” the video description reads.

While bringing Cortana to the desktop does make sense, Microsoft does a very good job in keeping all interesting details away from us.

The company has indeed offered some hints suggesting that such a thing could happen in the future, but no other specifics have been provided, leaving us wondering whether Windows 9 could be the first OS version launched by Microsoft to come with a personal assistant on tablets and PCs.

People close to the matter said that Cortana could indeed see daylight together with Windows 9, and the first beta of the operating system, which is projected to be launched later this year, is also expected to come with a preview version of the digital assistant.

Nothing is confirmed so far, but it's pretty clear that the days when we will be talking with our PCs are not really far away. More on this could be disclosed next week at the WPC conference when Microsoft is also expected to share details about its future projects, including Windows 9 and Cortana.