Cortana is Microsoft’s personal AI assistant for smartphones, named for a fictional character from the company’s sci-fi video game series Halo.Strictly speaking, engineers coded her into existence, but her well-timed wit comes courtesy of Microsoft’s resident blabbermouth, principal content publishing manager Jonathan Foster, and his creative posse of novelists, journalists, poets, filmmakers and playwrights who together shape the sass and spunk behind the gabby digital helper.
So the need to soften a bot’s cold, calculated edges has led to a new emerging path for poets, comedians and fiction writers like Foster inside tech companies. Foster, who earned an M.F.A. in film and playwriting from the University of Southern California, has written several plays and one novel — and loves writing witty banter.
See how Amazon Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana would do in a stand up routine
Comments