Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 8.1 "Blue" update is expected to bring with it a number of major new features to the Live Tile-based platform, including the oft-requested notification center. Another big Windows Phone 8.1 addition will reportedly be a new personal assistant dubbed "Cortana," and today some more details on he virtual helper have surfaced.

Named after an AI character in the Halo universe, Cortana will be able to "learn and adapt" thanks to some special machine-learning tech as well as the Bing knowledge base, reports ZDNet. Some screenshots shared by The Verge show that Cortana may include support for things like notifications, alarms with weather alerts and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth settings. The screenshots are said to be somewhat old at this point, though, and so it's likely that both the look of the app and its feature set have since improved.

Many major mobile platforms include some sort of voice assistant, ranging from Apple's Siri to Samsung's S Voice and Google Search on Android. Windows Phone also features built-in Bing voice assistance, and while Microsoft recently gave the feature some speed and accuracy improvements, it's apparently not done with voice quite yet. The stuff that we're seeing and hearing about Cortana today seems somewhat early, but what we have learned about Windows Phone's new assistant sounds pretty interesting, and it definitely gives fans of the platform more reason to be exciting for WP8.1's rumored early 2014 rollout.

Via ZDNet, The Verge