14 DAY TRIAL // Bill Gates returned to Microsoft in February 2014, when Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer and became the third CEO in the history of the software giant, but since then little has been revealed about his work within the company.
In a Reddit AMA session, Bill Gates provided a few more details regarding his current projects at Microsoft, explaining that one particular idea was to bring Personal Agents into our lives on all our devices.
While this really sounds a lot like Cortana, Bill Gates claims that his new Personal Agent will help you remember everything because it'll continue to be around you at all times using your devices, such as phones and tablets.
“One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to. The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model - the agent will help solve this. It will work across all your devices,” Gates explained.
An improved version of Cortana?
Ever since Microsoft introduced Cortana for the first time, company executives have referred to it as to a personal assistant that can make your life easier by keeping track of your activities, daily routine, appointments and remembering things.
Bill Gates' new Personal Agent could thus become an improved version of Cortana, that wouldn't need any manual input to remember things but could do it completely automatically and thus become more personal than ever.
Interestingly, Microsoft wants to make this available across all devices, which is undoubtedly a very optimistic plan that would help the software giant compete against rivals, not only in the smartphone market, where digital assistants already exist, but also in IoT and other industries, where such technologies would make sense.
Microsoft is one of the companies that are betting big on IoT, and Windows 10 and the new Personal Agent are two of the projects that could help it make the most of the growing opportunity in this new industry.