The digital assistant is now capable of opening files

Dec 4, 2020 14:31 GMT  ·  By

We’ve known for a while Cortana has become a second-class citizen in Windows 10, and with Microsoft focusing more on enterprises, this is pretty much the only market the digital assistant would eventually be focused on.

And the most recent Windows 10 preview build brings new capabilities for Cortana in the enterprise, as the assistant can no search for and open files in the cloud.

“Enterprise users who sign into Cortana with their corporate credentials (e.g., AAD) can search for files saved on OneDrive For Business and SharePoint along with files saved locally on their PCs (this setting is at Settings > Search > Searching Windows). Users using a Microsoft account (e.g., ending with Outlook.com or Hotmail.com) can use Cortana to find files saved on their PCs. This feature is currently available to our English-speaking users in U.S.,” Microsoft explains in the release notes of the latest Insider build.

Supported commands

To use Cortana to open or search files, you can turn to commands that include parts of file names, author names, documents that have recently been edited, or with a specific format.

Some of the commands that work are the following:  

  • Hey Cortana, opening marketing deck
  • Hey Cortana, open budget Excel from Anthony
  • Hey Cortana, find my recent files
  • Hey Cortana, find my recent pdfs

These improvements do not come with a specific release date, so they’re not tied to a Windows 10 feature update. In other words, nobody knows exactly when they are supposed to go live, but Microsoft can very well enable them for users with the help of a server-side switch when they are ready.

As for Windows 10 feature updates, the next one is due in the spring, and it’s likely to be just another minor release that’s mostly focused on under-the-hood improvements rather than on new features.