Cortana suggested reminders keep track of your email obligations

Microsoft has announced the arrival of suggested reminders in Windows 10 via Cortana, its personal assistant. With this feature, Cortana mines your email to find any mentions of obligations or promises to deliver something by a certain time or date. When it finds such a promise, Cortana will prompt you with a suggested reminder about that item, ensuring you don't forget to follow through.

The idea here seems to be that life is busy, and it's easy to lose track of time and your obligations. If you told your boss, professor, or anyone else that you'd send them such-and-such by the next morning, by the weekend, or even by a certain dates, Cortana will know thanks to machine learning technology developed in part by Microsoft Research.

In the course of using your PC, Cortana will prompt you with a 'Don't forget...' suggested reminder, presenting the snippet of text relevant to your promise. For example, if you recently sent an email that said something like, "I'll send you the report by Friday," the Cortana prompt will include that bit of text, helping jog your memory.

Users can choose to snooze the reminders for a specific duration of time, and to also mark them as complete. You'll be able to find these suggested reminders saved in the Action Center, as well as Cortana home.

This feature has arrived in Windows 10 for those in the U.S., and will be rolling out to Android and iOS soon. You'll need to be using Office 365 or Outlook.com to use the feature, however, though support for school email addresses and other services is also inbound.

SOURCE: Windows Blog