Siri listens for Podcasts, Cortana seeks new smarts

Good news! There will be more ways to talk to your gadget. I'm Bridget Carey, and this is your CNET Update. [MUSIC] Siri has learned a few new tricks. Apple's voice assistant now understands your commands to play your favorite podcast. Apple updated it's podcast app so, you can ask Siri to play all your favorite podcasts by saying the command, play podcasts or you could just play a specific one by naming the episode or show, like CNET Update. The podcast app also works with Apple's Car Play and it let's you share links using Air Drop, but Siri isn't the only smart assistant getting an upgrade. It appears that there's more in store for Microsoft's Cortana, and maybe we'll find her eventually on Window's PCs or tablets. Well at least, that's the takeaway from a job listing on Microsoft's website. The posting seeks an engineer to help shape the evolution of Microsoft's digital assistant and redefine the personalization experience on Windows. So that could be more platforms than just the Windows phone. Cortana is rolling out to new Windows phones this month, and she'll be in an update on existing Windows phones sometime in June. There is something new coming soon from the Windows Surface world. Microsoft is holding an event, in New York Tuesday, to unveil Surface News. Microsoft calls it quote, a small event which is likely a tease to the much rumored Surface Mini. That would be a Windows tablet with a seven or eight inch screen similar to the iPad mini. But there may be more, sources tell CNET that Microsoft is planning to release an update of the Surface Pro with Intel's latest Haswell chip set. We'll find out for sure on Tuesday, May 20th. You can watch the news event live on CNET at 8 am Pacific, 11 am Eastern. In other Microsoft news, let's switch over to the XBox, owners of an XBox will no longer have to pay for a Live Gold account to be able to access several apps, like Netflix, finally. No more pay wall. Just use the programs you already pay for. And when the switch happens in June, you can request a prorated refund on the Xbox support site to cancel the rest of your Gold subscription. Folks have until the end of August to ask for that refund. But you'll probably want that subscription come next year when the new Halo game comes out. Master Chief returns in Halo 5: Guardians of the Galaxy. It's out in the Fall of 2015 for the Xbox One console. We don't know much about the story, but game maker 343 Industries released a statement saying, it will be a bigger effort to make than Halo 4 because it's gonna take full advantage of the Xbox One's hardware. That's your tech news update. You can find more on these stories at cnet.com. From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey. [MUSIC]