At the end of this week Microsoft will present its Windows 10 operating system together with Cortana, the virtual assistant that will also be included in the system and that is already enjoyed by users of the brand's smartphones and that compete with Siri, Apple's assistant.
From what it seems, Windows 10 users will have desktop access to Cortana available, but not only in Windows, but also in Mac OS X we will be able to access this functionality thanks to the new update of the Parallels virtualization software, which reaches version 11 and will allow Windows 10 to run with all the features intact. If we pay attention to this leak, Parallels 11 would include this new Windows 10 feature which will allow you to access Cortana on OS X, while Windows 10 is running in the background.
This would mean that we can access Cortana directly pronouncing "Hey Cortana" at any time, while we are using other applications on Mac.
The virtual assistant can search the web, find files and installed applications, manage the calendar ... in addition to this and like Siri, Cortana can answer more natural language questions such as the results of a match or simply saying "What appointments do I have for this weekend?"
The downside is that we will have to run the virtualization software and boot the system to enable this function, something that will consume more RAM and resources than desired if we are not going to use Windows at that time.
In any case, it is quite an achievement that we can have Cortana almost "natively" in OS X even if it runs in virtualized software since we can take advantage of the search engine and its greatest user learning regarding Siri.