In the field of voice-based virtual assistants, Google recently made a strong statement with its Google Assistant, which has received positive response from critics for its use of artificial intelligence. In order to provide more utility to its voice-assistant and make it a more lucrative offering, Microsoft has updated Cortana’s Android app with several new features.

The Cortana for Android update brings along faster home page loading and a more accurate reminder triggering on Android Marshmallow devices. Further, it comes with better notification sounds for reminder and offers pull-down refresh capability for your reminder list page, as per the changelog of the application on Google Play.

Microsoft’s Cortana on Android has been updated to version 1.9.10. The application has been downloaded between 1 million to 5 million times since its launch last year and can be installed on devices running Android 4.1 and above.

Recently, researchers at Microsoft claimed that their speech recognition system has reached ‘human parity’. This effectively means that the speech recognition system can recognise words from a conversation as well as humans would do. In order to attain this improvement in speech recognition, the company has made use of neural language models.This improvement in speech recognition is likely to benefit Cortana, which takes voice commands from users to help them perform daily tasks with ease.