Microsoft mobile apps update with Cortana and more

Other services such as Microsoft Teams or Lens have also enjoyed great changes through an update that seems little less than important. All the use of programs focused on productivity has also risen due to the pandemic, where Microsoft has seen how the use of Teams, Outlook and Office rose significantly.

Microsoft Office mobile apps get better with the arrival of Cortana

The company has communicated all the changes that are underway to its large suite of mobile applications, both for Android and iOS. Office for mobile, Outlook or Teams will improve with the idea of ​​facilitating the use of these apps on mobile devices and interactions with other users.

Microsoft’s personal assistant will be integrated into Outlook and Teams to respond to user requests. Search emails, calendar appointments, locate messages from a specific user, files that were shared … Of course, it will be first available only in english.

Office 365 applications gain the ability to create small shortcuts with a multitude of different tasks. The so-called ‘Micro tasking shortcuts’ allow you to create small surveys in Office or Teams, use shortcuts to OneDrive files, etc. In addition, the productivity application for mobile will not only continue to offer the reading and editing of PDF documents, it will also allow annotations. Notes, forms, dates, and timestamps may be included.

Office Lens changes its name and can now transcribe texts

In a different vein but closely related to the news, Microsoft has thoroughly renewed its application to scan documents by changing its name and incorporating a large number of new functions: the app goes from Office Lens to Microsoft Lens.

Basically, apart from working as a scanner it is now possible transcribe text, read it and even digitize tables. With the change to Microsoft Lens, the company takes the opportunity to be inspired by the competition (in this case, Google’s) by incorporating its Artificial Intelligence system at the service of recognizing everything that is captured. In addition to that, an “immersive reader” has been added to facilitate the reading of documents. It will also be possible read QR codes using the Microsoft application.

The experience when scanning documents has also been improved with this update, giving the possibility of reorder pages, edit scanned PDF files or apply filters to all images in a document. In this sense, the possibility of scan up to 100 pages as images or PDF.