Microsoft hints at “something big” coming this Thursday, and I have a nasty feeling I know what it is

Do you feel that? That’s the stirring of a feature Microsoft tried to make work twice before, but never caught on. We thought the company had forgotten about it, but now, it’s dropping hints that it’s ready for a round three. And while Microsoft hasn’t confirmed what it is, I have a sneaking feeling what it’s planning, and we’ll find out for sure this coming Thursday.

Microsoft might be resurrecting the ancient power of Cortana in Windows 11

So, a brief bit of context. If you’re a Windows fan, you’ll likely be familiar with Cortana. And if you know of Cortana, you’ll know how much Microsoft pushed to make it a voice-controlled tool for your operating system. The idea was that you didn’t have to touch your keyboard or mouse; you just said “Hey Cortana” and then told her what you wanted to do. It wasn’t even the first time we saw Microsoft try this; Windows Vista had Windows Speech Recognition before then, which attempted the same thing, but with less success.

Of course, when Cortana launched in 2014, the modern-day LLM version of AI was a ways off, so you only had some pre-set commands you could do. And as you might imagine, it fell off, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief and went back to using their keyboards.

Now that you know the context of my dread, check out this random X post from the Windows account for no reason whatsoever:

I mean, it has to be, right? It has to be a third shot at Microsoft’s dream to have us all arguing with our computers to get it to do what we want it to do. We have the technology to do it, too; with the rise of AI LLMs like Copilot, you no longer have to speak an exact command to get something done. In theory, you could describe what you want to do and have Copilot figure out how to achieve it on its own.

Do we have the technology for a Cortana-like system that will actually do its job properly this time? Absolutely. Will it take off? Don’t count on it. I don’t think, after all these years, we’ve warmed to the concept of talking to our computers any more than we have during the prime Cortana years. Still, I’m willing to be proven wrong; that is, if I’m even correct. While we wait, why not take a walk down the negative version of memory lane (regret avenue?) and check out these controversial Windows features that have divided fans, with Cortana taking a top spot.