Cortana gets new features powered by Bing: Evening alerts, concerts, flights, and local app recommendations

Microsoft today announced improvements to Cortana that take advantage of recent Bing advancements in speech recognition, entity understanding, and stream processing. As a result of the search engine’s ability to better index the real world, Cortana can now better handle evening alerts, concerts, flights, and local app recommendations.

First off, Cortana can now show you travel time to home and upcoming items on your calendar (you may want to give Cortana your home and office addresses). Whether you have a dinner date or need to go to bed early to wake up for a morning meeting, Cortana can now remind you.

Cortana can now also infer artists that you might like and notifies you when they are playing in your area. Based on searches you make on your Windows Phone device, Windows 8 devices, and Bing.com, the digital assistant can guess who you like listening to and lets you know if they are performing within 100 miles of your home. This feature can be activated by going to Cortana’s notebook, selecting Music, and then picking Concert Watch.

As you can see in the second screenshot, you can just ask Cortana about concerts as well. You can be as specific as above or just say, “What are Justin Timberlake’s tour dates?”

If you look up a flight twice within a week on Bing.com or directly in Cortana, she will guess that this might be an important flight and ask you if she should keep tabs on it. Once you confirm, the flight will be added as an interest inside Cortana’s notebook and updates will be visible on the Bing.com homepage carousel as well as in Cortana. Unfortunately, this feature is only available to U.S. users.

Finally, Cortana can now recommend apps that are relevant and helpful based on where you are (if you ignore the recommendation a few times, Cortana will stop showing it to you). If you already have a given app, Cortana will instead let you know it’s relevant to where you happen to be. In this case, the hyperlocal card only works in the U.S. and the U.K.

These are all great additions that highlight why Cortana’s edge over Siri depends largely on the fact that it’s powered by Bing. If the additions continue at this rate, the digital assistant will become a serious player in the space.

In fact, Microsoft says it plans to release even more features “in the coming weeks.”

Update: The original version of the Bing announcement mentioned “rankings for NFL, NCAA, and Top Global Soccer Leagues.” Microsoft has since pulled this information, but since we saw it, we can reasonably guess those are at least part of the features the company is planning for release next.