It has long been rumoured that Microsoft will be bringing Cortana to desktop PCs and tablets and latest Windows 10 Technical Preview build 9879 brings with it just that – few concrete traces of it at least.
There have been few traces of Cortana here and there in previous Windows 10 TP builds, but build 9879 is the first to pack a Cortana configuration screen. Accessible through zPC settings app, the “Cortana and speech” settings can be found under the “Privacy” menu.
There isn’t much on the configuration screen for now expect for the ability to clear local personalisation data on the machine related to Cortana.
The description under “Cortana and speech” reads: “When you use Cortana or speech, your personalization data is used to improve speed recognition, dictation, and text-to-speech. You can go to Bing to manage your cloud data and also clear your local data below. Turn off Cortana and speech to disable personalization.”
Read More: Upgrading to Windows 10 from Windows 8, 7 without losing data – it’s possible
Cortana will also be storing cloud based information it learns about the user and so you will be required to go to bing.com to clear off that data as well or decide on what you want Cortana to know about you. This option is already present in the Windows Phone version of Cortana.
Few enthusiasts dub around Windows 10 system files to find a new “CortanaUI” shortcut using which you could launch the personal assistant.
Read More: Microsoft: Windows 10 will run on all Windows Phone 8 devices, not just Lumia handsets
As far as other features of Windows 10 Technical Preview build 9879 are concerned, it features ability to hide the ‘Search or Task View buttons’ on the taskbar, which we had talked about earlier.
Microsoft has also revealed a few Windows 10 enterprise features including cloud-oriented Azure Active Directory, Mobile Device Management (MDM), In-place upgrades, and Runtime configuration for choose your own device.
