Microsoft has brought native language translation support to its virtual personal assistant Cortana, on Windows 10. Cortana can now translate words and phrases to 39 languages from English and Chinese, depending on the region (U.S or Chinese).
Cortana uses its recently-launched Microsoft Translator for providing the translations. One can ask Cortana for translations in different ways like, “Hey Cortana, translate where is the nearest taxi stand in French,” or "Hey Cortana, how to say where is the closest grocery store in Hindi?" It will respond to the query with a corresponding translation. However, the user can choose to skip “Hey Cortana”, if he is typing the phrase instead of speaking to it.
Microsoft has said that for cases when Cortana might not understand the voice input, or does have the translation for the asked phrase, it will show results from the internet on a web page. Presently, this is what Cortana generally does for queries to which it does not have answers. For now, Cortana can translate to these languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Klingon (pIqaD), Korean, Latvian, Malay, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
Cortana is an integral part of Windows, for both phones and PCs. Microsoft is also working on bringing it to iOS and Android. Recently, the company announced Cortana and Windows 10's widespread acceptance after its July 29th global launch. The latest OS saw 14 million downloads within 24 hours of its release, which climbed to 75 million in 192 countries within one month.