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Microsoft Updates Cortana to Actually Care If You’re Bleeding to Death

Medical help now provided in case of emergency

Apr 11, 2018 10:14 GMT  ·  By
Cortana can now help if you're bleeding to death
   Cortana can now help if you're bleeding to death

Digital assistants are becoming more of a common thing these days, and while tech companies have focused heavily on improving their capabilities, the hardest thing to do was to make them be as humanly as possible.

And while making a robot show compassion is quite a challenge, there are cases when these assistants, which many, including Microsoft, call “personal assistants,” give totally unexpected responses.

This is exactly what happened when Twitter user Maneesh Juneja told Cortana that he was bleeding. The assistant responded just like it didn’t care. “Okay” and “Interesting” were of the answers is offered, even though it was obvious that Cortana should have at least displayed an emergency phone number on the screen for the man in need to quickly call emergency services.

And now it cares about you

The tweet gained attention including from Microsoft, and the software giant updated Cortana to actually care about the owner “bleeding to death.” The software giant tweaked the responses offered by Cortana to tell humans what they need to do if they’re bleeding, and at the same time, to provide quick shortcuts for seeking more information online on how to deal with this.

There’s still no shortcut to call emergency services, though in this case, the easy workaround is to just tell Cortana to “dial 911” and the digital assistant should take care of it.

There might be more in this update, with Cortana likely to offer other useful responses depending on the medical emergencies and the commands that users send, but Microsoft hasn’t offered any information in this regard. Without a doubt, however, the company will spend a little bit more time improving this side of the assistant in the future.

Digital assistant Cortana is now a key feature not only on Windows devices, but also on Android and iOS, where Microsoft is pushing hard to make a more widely adopted app despite the native assistants available on each platform.