Cortana will become even more powerful with proactive actions, greater contextual awareness

At Tuesday's Build keynote, Microsoft showed how the company plans to add increased utility to its Cortana digital assistant, through greater contextual awareness and more proactive actions. It's not clear when these capabilities will come to Cortana, though it seems likely they'll be rolled out over the coming months, probably timed to coincide with the Anniversary Update of Windows 10 this summer. Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella said the improvements to Cortana are part of a larger conversation the company is having, involving natural language interactions with users and even other automated digital intelligence, or bots. Cortana, though, remains the premier way for users to interact with a Windows 10 PC or phone. Marcus Ash, the group product manager for Cortana at Microsoft, showed off some of its new capabilities--the most impressive of which was its ability to "send [a colleague] the PowerPoint that I worked on last night".