14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is pushing hard for Cortana, and as part of its efforts to convince the world to embrace the digital assistant, the company is looking into a technology that could be used to completely give up on user manuals.
Specifically, Microsoft sees the future without quick start guides, which only a few people read when setting up new devices, with Cortana to be in charge of assisting users after purchasing new guides.
This means that instead of having to read the manual, users would be guided by Cortana to configure a new device using instructions that can be found online. A patent recently filed by Microsoft shows that, as part of such a feature, Cortana can even take care of registration processes by automatically filling in information that it already knows about you, contributing to an overall seamless device configuration experience.
Windows 10 devices to the rescue
“The digital assistance device at least partially automates the setup process that would usually come in a quick start guide. This is made possible by digitalizing the quick start guide so as to be at least partially interpretable by the digital assistance device,” Microsoft says in the patent as discovered by MSPU.
“The digital assistance device can thereby determine, for each step, what it can do based on its information and capability, but also how the instructions can be simplified based on what it knows, and for what it cannot do, it passes all or a portion of the quick start guide for that step to the user via an intractable interface. Accordingly, potential manual setup tasks are offloaded to automation, thereby simplifying the setup of a device through technical automation.”
Microsoft doesn’t make it very clear where Cortana would run, but there’s a chance that Microsoft wants to rely on users’ Windows devices where the personal assistant already exists. This way, the company can shoot two birds with one stone and not only offer instructions to users, but also make a Windows 10 device the core of the entire experience.