The Cortana Setup Guide

Talderon

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The purpose of this guide is to help you do some initial setup of Cortana in order to help you get the most out of her right from the start. Is this EVERYTHING? No, but it's a jumpstart.

When you open up Cortana for the first time, you will be greeted with a walkthrough for an initial setup. I would HIGHLY suggest you go through these short steps to get her rolling.

Once done, go into the settings (3 horizontal bars on the top right corner) and explore some things:

Interests - This is where you will go to tell Cortana the things you are interested in. The selection is NOT complete and WILL GROW!!

Remind Me - This is where all of your reminders you ask Cortana to set will show up.

Quiet Hours - We'll go into more detail below.

Inner Circle - We'll go into more detail below.

Places - We'll go into more detail below.

Music and Searches - This is where you can use Cortana to identify songs that are playing (Like Shazam and SoundHound)

Settings - This is where you can turn Cortana on or off as well as a few other features. We'll go into that later as well.

Ok, We'll get into things here in the order that makes sense. You can do this however you want, but we'll do it my way (since I am writing it, LOL!).

Inner Circle

This is where you add/remove people that you want to have priority on being able to contact you. For now, this is utilized only in Quiet Hours, but more uses may come of this in the future.

You can add people here from the suggestions below or from your contact list. The only real option at this time is to add/remove.

Now, once you have added someone, you can tap on them and notice that there are 3 Nickname boxes. Here is where you want to put your other names you call people (like Dad, Mom, Brother and so on). You can pretty much put whatever you want (like Slacker for my brother). You can have up to 3 for any contact that you put in your inner circle.

If you want to put a nickname for someone that is NOT in your inner circle, you can by editing their contact info on your device, but you only get to add ONE nickname that way.

Quiet Hours

This is where you will take advantage of the setup you did for Inner Circle.

You can turn Quiet hours on/off at ANY time using the Right Now toggle. No further setup is needed for this.

Automatic Rules allow you to set up a schedule that you want to automatically turn on these rules. You can only have one set of rules at this time (so you can't have a weekday set and a weekend set (this is being looked into)). You can also tell it to set quiet hours based on calendar events (but only one calendar can be selected).

Breakthrough Rules is where your Inner Circle work comes in. You can set the option that if anyone calls 2 times in within 3 minutes, they will break through. You can also turn on/off inner circle breakthrough as well.

You have some additional refinements for the inner circle where you can just allow it to come through, have it prompt the person to break through or just not allow anyone to break through (not sure why this option is there since you can just turn it off, but oh well). You can also have them hear a message that you are busy at this time for anyone that is not in your inner circle.

Places

This is one of my FAVORITE parts of Cortana for customization!! Here, you can add as many places that you want with Nicknames if you choose to use them. This is where the GeoFencing REALLY shines and allows you to help Cortana learn about how you go about life.

I have places listed in here like my most frequently used grocery store, pharmacy, home, work, doctors office, favorite place to kayak and so on.

Putting work into this section will REALLY pay off in the long run. You can use queries like:

Remind me to call my brother when I get home - This will kick off a reminder to call your brother when you get home.

Remind me to stop by Freddy's on my way home to get milk - You don't even have to GO there, as long as you drive by the location, you will get a reminder. Albeit, this won't help you if it is not on your way, but it's something!

Remind me to as my brother about the drill he borrowed next time I am at his house - Pretty self explanatory.

Now, you get the idea.

The settings are pretty self explanatory as well as the rest of Cortana's settings. Please let me know if you have any questions though!

Thanks!
 

SwimSwim

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Thanks for the guide. I personally am tech Davy enough to figure it out, but I'll share it with my friends who don't puck up on technology as easily. Thanks, appreciated.
 

luiislp

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I always have the location services off to save battery. Now having Cortana on board I'll have to have the location services on so I can get most of the features right ?? how much this will affect my battery life in my L925 which gets 15 hours ,
Thanks! :)
 

Talderon

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I always have the location services off to save battery. Now having Cortana on board I'll have to have the location services on so I can get most of the features right ?? how much this will affect my battery life in my L925 which gets 15 hours ,
Thanks! :)

I honestly can't tell you since I have never had a L925. I have had a 920, 8X and 1520 and always have location on. I never really had any issues with Battery. I would suggest you turn it on for a day and see (in comparison to a day without it on). Also, I have found WP8.1 to be a bit more friendly with the battery.
 

anon(7900571)

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I honestly can't tell you since I have never had a L925. I have had a 920, 8X and 1520 and always have location on. I never really had any issues with Battery. I would suggest you turn it on for a day and see (in comparison to a day without it on). Also, I have found WP8.1 to be a bit more friendly with the battery.

If I am not wrong , you have wp 8.1 on your lumia 1520 , do you have the same on lumia 920. If so how's the impression ?
 

Talderon

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If I am not wrong , you have wp 8.1 on your lumia 1520 , do you have the same on lumia 920. If so how's the impression ?

I have it on the following devices:

L1520
L920
L520
HTC 8X

ALL of these devices run WP8.1 and Cortana just fine. The ONLY differences will be the subtle ones like App Launch time because of the processor. But all in all, Cortana is REALLY responsive as if you were to just bring up Bing Search. A lot of work went into making this fast and responsive across all devices.'

As stated above, the ONLY difference I see is the functions that are CPU bound, however, overall, it's nominal differences.
 

anon(7900571)

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I have it on the following devices:

L1520
L920
L520
HTC 8X

ALL of these devices run WP8.1 and Cortana just fine. The ONLY differences will be the subtle ones like App Launch time because of the processor. But all in all, Cortana is REALLY responsive as if you were to just bring up Bing Search. A lot of work went into making this fast and responsive across all devices.'

As stated above, the ONLY difference I see is the functions that are CPU bound, however, overall, it's nominal differences.

Great , how's the battery life on lumia 920 , is it improved ? What I have enabled location and cortana will they both suck battery life on l920.
Dual core vs quad core yes I can understand the difference very well lol.
 

Talderon

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Great , how's the battery life on lumia 920 , is it improved ? What I have enabled location and cortana will they both suck battery life on l920.
Dual core vs quad core yes I can understand the difference very well lol.

I don't use it as my daily driver anymore, but I can say that I have not had any issues with the battery. I leave it off the charger for hours on end and does not seem to drain too badly. I'll try to get some better metrics later.

I put some images up here: Battery Saver - Imgur

I use Cortana fairly regularly most days, but today has been a pretty easy day for her. You can see her consumption is REALLY low when not used. As for her App in background usage, I have NEVER seen it higher than it is now.

I mean, look at the WPCentral app. I have used it a bit today to keep up on news they post and I have live tile updates on, but when it is not active, it just trickles.

Internet Explorer is the second highest battery use right now, and the background usage is the same as the rest, just a sliver.

Now, looking at the list of apps, Allowed means that it is allowed to run in background. Always Allowed means that it is allowed to run in background AND when Battery Saver is on.
 

Talderon

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Great I am now more excited for this update. Thanks for sharing In depth details for wp 8.1 :smile:

Hey, no problem at all. My wife has a Lumia 1520 as well. Hers is on WP8 still (I was not allowed to put it on any devices other than my own, we agreed it was not worth my job) and let me tell you. It's almost alien to me now. No Cortana is the real shocker. You go back and try to do things and feel lost. I want people to be excited about this update and all of the future updates to come!!!
 

anon(7900571)

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Hey, no problem at all. My wife has a Lumia 1520 as well. Hers is on WP8 still (I was not allowed to put it on any devices other than my own, we agreed it was not worth my job) and let me tell you. It's almost alien to me now. No Cortana is the real shocker. You go back and try to do things and feel lost. I want people to be excited about this update and all of the future updates to come!!!

To be very honest when I updated my iPad 3 to iOS 6 , I got Siri. But it was a grey disappointment , she was not at all able to accept my accent and still does not on iOS 7. She is useless and when I compare it to cortana. Haha I can understand your situation lol your wife must be jelly that you are enjoying wp8.1 on your lumia. Brew any idea if cortana will be made to work offline , just like we have tellme at moment ? It would be great if she could do basic task offline.
 

Talderon

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To be very honest when I updated my iPad 3 to iOS 6 , I got Siri. But it was a grey disappointment , she was not at all able to accept my accent and still does not on iOS 7. She is useless and when I compare it to cortana. Haha I can understand your situation lol your wife must be jelly that you are enjoying wp8.1 on your lumia. Brew any idea if cortana will be made to work offline , just like we have tellme at moment ? It would be great if she could do basic task offline.

Right now, her offline functionality is really... well... it's barely there. For v1, the online services and features were the key to getting her off the ground. As time goes on, her offline functions should expand and allows us to user her even further.
 

avinash573

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Thank you for the guide Talderon. I am so excited to get WP 8.1 on my L1520.

What MS is doing with W8 and WP8 is really awesome. I have always been an MS ****** but they have really stepped up their game. It is a shame that people still think there are only two kinds of phones (iPhone and Android). I try to do my bit in making people aware about WP. I really want this to succeed.
 

Talderon

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Cortana has a bright future

Just wait. Cortana on Windows Phone... Xbox One... PC's and Tablets... Cortana will be everywhere!!!!

I want to be able to walk into my house and have the Xbox One see me and have Cortana say "Remember you wanted to call your brother when you got home, shall I initiate the call now?"

I want to sit at my PC and have her say "Remember to send that proposal in today!" or "Business or Games today?" or whatever.

Yeah, I'm one of "those people" that want to have technology in every part of my life. :D
 

anon(7900571)

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Just wait. Cortana on Windows Phone... Xbox One... PC's and Tablets... Cortana will be everywhere!!!!

I want to be able to walk into my house and have the Xbox One see me and have Cortana say "Remember you wanted to call your brother when you got home, shall I initiate the call now?"

I want to sit at my PC and have her say "Remember to send that proposal in today!" or "Business or Games today?" or whatever.

Yeah, I'm one of "those people" that want to have technology in every part of my life. :D

You reminded me the good old movie smart house by Disney lol.
 

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