Cortana - Calendar Reminders

[Dewg]

I've got my M8 synced with my Office 365 account, so my work calendar is on the phone. Cortana is set to remind me about calendar events and offer me traffic and "leave now" reminders.

However, I've never seen one come through. How does Cortana remind you when it's time to leave for an event? Is it a verbal notice, or does the live tile change, or you get a notification sound, or is there something on the lock screen?

When I had Google Now on Android, it would play my text message notification sound and then put an alert in my lock screen and notification screen that it was time to leave for an appointment (and the time to get there with traffic).

 

[cbreze]

Don't know about verbal, all I get is my calendar alert going off at the time I asked for. If I say "remind me to shut the hose off at noon" I get a calendar alert at noon. If I say "give me a reminder at noon" Cortana will ask what the reminder is for. But so far I've never gotten a verbal reminder from Cortana. Any reminders I ask Cortana to set for me always show up on my lock screen and in my calendar as if I had written them in there myself. So it does cut out the middle man work. It'd be cool if she spoke to me when the reminder was due. Maybe someone else will chime in with a better experience.

 

[Captains]

I was working on Cortana & my calender last night. I could ask Cortana to create an event in the future but if i follow up by asking, she wouldn't find it. The other thing I thought that if I have appointments & events in my calender including my b'day then Cortana should be able to see them all & include them in her response. I struggled with this & didn't have any real success.

I would like to know if anyone has had better

 

[jlangner]

If you have seen the Cortana/Siri commercial on TV, the reminder he gets from Cortana is the way they all look regarding leaving for an event.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0pjD4qpIpg&feature=youtu.be

 

[fonzman78]

I don't have the M8 yet, but on my 8x a full screen appears telling me to 'leave now' based on where I'm headed and what the traffic is like. The screen has a small map, traffic conditions, and a notification saying "time to leave'. This seems to only work when I have the address of my appointment in the Where line of the calendar invite. So if I have 'Dr's Office' in Where, nothing happens. But if I have 1234 W State St, Smallville then the notice appears.

You might want to double check your calendar invites and see if there is actual address in the invite.

 

[dgr_874]

I don't have the M8 yet, but on my 8x a full screen appears telling me to 'leave now' based on where I'm headed and what the traffic is like. The screen has a small map, traffic conditions, and a notification saying "time to leave'. This seems to only work when I have the address of my appointment in the Where line of the calendar invite. So if I have 'Dr's Office' in Where, nothing happens. But if I have 1234 W State St, Smallville then the notice appears.
You might want to double check your calendar invites and see if there is actual address in the invite.

This is the way my 920 works also. You have to put some sort of address into the appointment block for it to remind you to leave on time. You can speed the process along by using nicknames for your most used places in Cortana. I have my work address, which goes by "the shop", and I just enter "the shop" in the calendar location block and it knows the address I put in earlier and reminds me to leave for that destination.

 

[techgeek32#WN]

One thing I found out was Cortana only works with an Outlook.com account. When I tried with Google or my work Exchange account Cortana would not work. You might want to try creating an Outlook.com account (Hotmail, Live account) can be created as an Exchange account.

 

[Dewg]

I appreciate everyone's help. I solved my problem by turning off Cortana - which signed me out and restarted the phone. After the restart (which took much longer than a normal restart), I started Cortana again and she went through the initial setup, but remembered all my information. I knew something was working better, because she immediately knew it was lunch time and started offering me places to eat - she didn't do that before.

I entered a test calendar event (in my Exchange calendar), and she told me when to leave and showed me traffic.

Excellent!

 

[M Reno]

I've found Cortana to be a bit of a disappointment. I get no feedback from her. I've tried the reboot thing... include several variations I've read about (such as disable Cortana, reboot, THEN enable her.)

The only thing I've ever been able to get her to do with any sort of repeat-ability is tell me what the fox says, and that got old after the second time! ;-)

She doesn't tell me about drive time, lunch time... doesn't even seem to pay attention to the sort of news I read. I get these odd Alerts about random news events.

And I get no calendare reminders from her... it's all the standard Outlook reminders. (I'm using exchange hosted at our office, BTW).

Is there some sort of setting that I'm missing?