Recently in class I mentioned I had seen the movie ‘Her,’ a story about a man who falls in love with his operating system. I wasn’t terribly excited about seeing it; I chalked it up to another take on the romantic comedy, a genre of film I find repellent. That’s why I was surprised at how good I thought it was, as it touched on issues of technology dependence and withdrawal, isolationism, loneliness in an increasingly connected yet decreasingly face-to-face world, plus it removed the issue of physical appearance, for both parties, from the equation. In fairness to the guy, the OS was voiced by Scarlett Johanssen. Give him a break!

A couple of you mentioned that you thought the whole thing was just too weird, that the very concept itself was unnerving. Well, prepare for it to get weirder and unnerving-er! In the same vein as that movie, Microsoft is readying what it refers to as a digital assistant to take on the offerings from Apple (Siri) and Google (Google Now). In the upcoming release of the Windows Phone 8.1 platform, Microsoft will be including Cortana, a personal assistant named after the eponymous AI from their Halo series, that will not just respond to queries, but will have some personality as well, including the way it bounces around the screen or presents a frown based on queries posed. That also means it won’t take on the female persona it had in the games, and I suspect for good reason – considering she’s digital, it was surprisingly difficult to find an appropriate header image for this post.

Cortana will also be replacing Bing search on the phones. That doesn’t mean Bing is gone, not by any means. Bing will still be one of the underlying search mechanisms that provides Cortana her (her? its?) results, along with Nokia’s HERE maps among others, and Apple’s Siri uses Bing as its underlying search mechanism as well.

But with these personal digital assistants developing more and more of a personality, both reactive and specific, we’re starting to enter what I suspect will become a challenging time, especially since we are already dealing with many, many, many people experiencing a removal from real-life as they accept digital versions instead.