Windows Phone 8.1 adds voice assistant Cortana, gesture typing, and a new Start screen (hands-on)
The newest Windows Phone operating system is here and it ushers in a new voice assistant, notifications, and more.
SAN FRANCISCO -- During the company's keynote address at its Build developer conference Wednesday, Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 8.1, the newest version of its phone operating system. The long-awaited release brings Cortana, a voice assistant to rival Siri, a new Start screen and the Action Center notification drawer.
Windows Phone 8.1 will roll out to devices over the next few months. Any Windows Phone currently running version 8 of the operating system will get the update. Brand new devices will launch with it in late April and early May.
The first major feature added to 8.1 is Cortana. Like Siri, Cortana is a female voice assistant, and you can talk to her to search the Web using Bing, send messages, add notes, set reminders, get directions, and more.
Like Google Now and Siri, you can ask Cortana questions, such as "How did the San Francisco Giants do yesterday?" It's particularly good at answering sports questions, but you can ask it almost anything you want. Cortana replaces the simpler voice search feature of earlier versions of Windows Phone.
Action Center is a brand-new notification menu that pulls down from the top of your phone's screen and gives you quick access to common settings toggles and your notifications. From the top row, you can turn on or off Wi-Fi, airplane mode, or Bluetooth. Below those options, you'll see all of your notifications from your apps, such as text messages, missed calls, and new emails. Similar to iOS, you can customize which apps' notifications show up in Action Center. You can swipe away notifications, but if you have multiple notifications from one app, it will swipe away all of them at once.
I really like this feature, because it puts all the most common settings within easy reach. It's also easy to get to the full settings menu, thanks to a small button at the top of the Action Center.
The Start screen, Microsoft's name for your phone's home screen, now supports an extra column of tiles, even if you don't have a large phablet. You can now also set a home screen wallpaper, using one of the standard backgrounds that come with Windows Phone 8.1, or your own photos. Just like before, there's still a white or black space between the tiles (depending on your phone's set theme), but instead of a solid color background on each tile, you'll see a piece of the larger wallpaper image.
This is a cool feature, but it only shows up on live tiles that already use your Start screen theme. Those include all of the system apps, such as the phone dialer, the app store, and Internet Explorer. Any apps where the developer sets the live tile color, such as Office or Pandora, won't show the wallpaper.
The Word Flow keyboard (the stock keyboard that comes with Windows Phone) now gets gesture typing, and it works similarly to Swype and Swiftkey. It's easy to just drag your fingers from letter to letter to type, but in my brief hands-on time testing Word Flow, it didn't seem as accurate as other gesture keyboards out there.
Additional features added to Windows Phone 8.1 include:
- Wi-Fi Sense app, which helps you connect to networks faster by automatically accepting terms of agreement on free public Wi-Fi, or entering credentials for networks you need to sign into.
- A redesigned calendar app.
- A new version of Skype.
- Internet Explorer 11.
- VPN for secure browsing
- S/MIME support, so you can read encrypted emails.
This is the fourth generation of the Windows Phone OS, and it replaces the earlier Windows Phone 8. That version was updated in October 2013 with Windows Phone 8 Update 3, which added a new row of live tiles to the home screen on larger phones, task-switching, and a driving mode.