So you may have heard the news that Fusion 8 and Fusion 8 Pro support Windows 10 and the cool new Cortana feature, but you might be wondering ‘how does it work and how can I use it?’
Well the answer is pretty simple, and I’ll walk through how to turn it on so that she’s always listening, and can open up a browser and do other cool things in Windows for you just by asking for it.
Firstly, in your Windows 10 VM, you’ll need to get to the Cortana settings. I prefer to do this by just typing ‘cortana’ in, well, Cortana…
The nice thing about Windows 10 is the search tool works great!
Just click ‘Cortana & Search settings’ and turn on the ‘Hey Cortana’ feature.
The first time you turn it on you’ll have to teach it your voice by reading it a sentence or two. I only got a few words in before she had enough to remember my [apparently distinctive] voice.
Once that’s enabled you can at any point that your virtual machine is running simply say ‘hey cortana, do XYZ’ and if she knows how to do that she will.
We first tested it out just using the Edge browser by saying ‘Hey Cortana, open Edge’ and sure enough it heard it and launched the browser.
The other fun thing is doing that in Unity mode. Pretty handy to keep working away on the Mac and be able to just ask her to do something while you’re thinking of it.
I prefer to hide my dock when I’m using Unity, and I turn on the ‘Show Taskbar in Unity’ feature so I can access the old new Start menu.
Why thank you, Cortana!
Microsoft has a handy guide on what you can do with Cortana here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-what-is-cortana
Good times using Cortana and the new Edge browser on Windows 10 running in VMware Fusion 8 on your Mac =)
If you haven’t heard the news, Fusion 8 is now available worldwide! You can get it now right here!
