The latest Cortana update ushers in calls and texts by voice making it possible for you to call up a friend or family member or send them a message just by speaking to Microsoft’s digital assistant. Though Cortana may not be as robust or feature-rich as Google Assistant, calling and texting via voice input is going to make communicating with people that much easier if Cortana is the digital assistant you choose.
As you might expect, asking Cortana to call someone is the only thing you’ll need to do and then Cortana will place the call shortly after your request, so the process from initiating the call to actually being on the call is a pretty quick one save for you getting a voicemail and not the person you were trying to reach. Sending texts is nearly as quick, coming with the added step of having to tell Cortana what you want the message to be prior to asking it to send the message off to the recipient.
From the looks of things this is the only new feature on offer with this update that is actually something user-facing that you can interact with, though the update does also include a small change to where email commitments are stored. Now, these are all archived in a centralized location so getting to them should be much easier. Calls and texts through voice input may be the latest feature that Cortana has to offer, but there are other recent features that were added over the course of the last month or two. For example, Microsoft recently added support for multiple tools that help you use Cortana to interact with your smart home, like IFTTT, LIFX, TP-Link, ecobee and quite a few other brands. Even more recently it was reported that Microsoft would be adding Cortana into the Outlook app for Android.