Cortana can now tell you about new movies, plus you can 'Pick the Winners'

If you are using Cortana on your Windows Phone or Windows 10 preview device, you may want to dive into Settings > Interests to check off some new categories. It looks like the Cortana team has finally delivered on some new items for Cortana to follow, and we are excited to see how they work.

Sometime in the last few days 'Showtimes + Trailers' (found under Movies) and 'Pick the Winners' (found under Entertainment) were added to Cortana's information repository. Users can then enable the categories and the personal assistant will keep you up to date when there are changes.

Pick the Winners

So what is 'Pick the Winners'? Unfortunately, we do not have a real-world example yet to test, but under the category description Microsoft notes the following:

Cortana then has an enable/disable toggle for the 'Winner Picker'. If we had to guess, this all ties into the Bing prediction engine and trying to see how well you do, possibly like a mini-game of sorts. We will have to just wait for the next event to see how Microsoft makes use of this interest.

Showtimes + Trailers

'Showtimes + Trailers' is a little more straightforward. Here, Cortana will evidently display showtimes and trailers for new movies, with options to enable or disable either category. Being movie fans ourselves, having the latest films show up in our Cortana feed should be super helpful. Regrettably, at the time of writing this interest has not refreshed, so we cannot see yet how it all works.

Jump into your Cortana settings (Main screen, menu button in the upper right corner) to get started on adding these new interests to your feed. Let us know what you think! We should note that these interests are likely only in the US at this time, seeing as Cortana is still in Beta.

Thanks, Micah S., for the tip!