Office Now, Cortana for your work life

Soon, you'll be able to speak to your phone to tell it to "Send my financial presentation deck to Sarah," thanks to a personal Office assistant feature. Cortana, the digital assistant that will ship with Windows 10, may land in Office in the future to serve as your work assistant.

The unannounced feature, now known as Office Now, is said to be a rebrand of the earlier rumored Work Assistant. Like Cortana, Office Now is a virtual assistant. However, Office Now will live within Office and can respond to spoken or typed queries.

Office Now uses natural language recognition, and users can command it to send or share their files with named colleagues using voice. Other commands include find, open, view, edit, load and email. Office Now can search using metadata for file names, file locations, file types and last access dates.

Additionally, Office Now can help with scheduling meetings, planning travel and joining conference calls. It will show events that require travel and display information in a UI featuring Cards, similar to Google Now and Delve.