Meet the collection of Cortana personae in Windows Phone 8.1

Consumers thoroughly enjoy using Cortana and what she can bring to the Windows Phone experience and while many are impressed by the whole setup and how Cortana looks on-screen, there may be many hidden animations you may not be aware of. We know Cortana had an Easter egg in the form of Clippy (the famous Word assistant), but Leon Zandman decided to investigate further into how this was triggered and stumbled onto numerous Cortana personae.

Looking at how Windows Phone 8.1 interacted with Bing and Microsoft's cloud services to pull down information to produce to users, Zandman soon discovered that the animation for the Clippy Easter egg had to reside on the phone. Hunting through SDKs, Zandman located Cortana's image resources, which were stored in a handful of DLL files in a system directory on the Windows Phone's main partition. Checking through the resources, he was not only able to find an image for a retired Clippy, but also other personae.

Cortana Personas

The above image shows but a few of the images available for Cortana to display. It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft intends to do in the future with Cortana and animated responses. For now, be sure to read through Zandman's blog post for all the details. It's well worth checking out.

Source: Leon Zandman; thanks to everyone who tipped us!

Rich Edmonds
Senior Editor, PC Build

Rich Edmonds was formerly a Senior Editor of PC hardware at Windows Central, covering everything related to PC components and NAS. He's been involved in technology for more than a decade and knows a thing or two about the magic inside a PC chassis. You can follow him on Twitter at @RichEdmonds.

84 Comments
  • Nice
  • Nice
  • Nice
  • Combo 3 hits 33% damage
  • fire atack!!!  half live left!!!
  • KAMEHAMEHAAAAAAAAAAAAA
  • AAAAAND HE'S DEAD. 
  • Opps , Now we need the Dragon balls (which can be found through Dragon radar obviously)
  • C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker!
  • Noice
  • I'm so impressed that you are an active member here, Satya... You are my kind of CEO.
  • I really hope you are sarcastic, because that is not the rea Satya Nadella. Even the user wrote that in his bio.
  • Niche.
  • 좋은
  • すごい
  • Pěkné
  • Bien
  • ایول
  • Nietzsche
  • The philosopher?
  • Nope
  • Hoş
  • C-C-C-COMBO-BREAKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • 나이스! ល្អណាស់!
  • 素敵です
  • Nalla iruku ;)
  • What's that ? Which language ?
  • It's Tamil I guess!
  • Sema comment ji :P
  • Accha hai
  • Keren
  • Legal
  • Fedt!
  • Gokil
  • Kollam
  • C-C-C-COMBOO BREAAAKEERR!!
  • Trevligt
  • Yasal
  • 0101000010101
  • yae comment laika asa :D
  • Genial
  • What about USB otg in wp8.1?I can't find it. Btw loves Cortana, runs smoothly in my 520.
  • The clippy thing didn't work for me.
  • Ask two times about clippy and it will show up ;)
  • Cortana really is a feature I thought was going to be a gimmick and I am beginning to really enjoy it. The reminders. I had literally forgot what I needed to go to WalMart to buy but thankfully I reminded myself. With cortana two days prior and when j arrived at WalMart she reminded me :)
    I wished she talked more though. Instead of alerting me with a sound I got the clippy thing working :P
  • Yes me to.. Cortana definitely needs to talk more.
  • It will definetely
  • When is she supposed to greet you by your name.? Mine has yet to say my name aloud.
  • Did you offer her a cookie?
  • Say "Thank you Cortana" couple of times and she will eventually say your name.
  • I just did this literally 20 times in a row, and all I got were a bunch of "it's a pleasure" and "it's an honor". (well, and the occasional "you got it, chief.")
  • Same here. Odd since the setup wants to make sure your name is pronounced correctly, then never uses it.
  • Said "Thank you Cortana" another 20 times just for the pure hell of it and still nothing. I have yet to see any actual evidence that Cortana will speak the name you give.
  • 'The above image shows but a few...' Dutchman?
  • Nah. It's called "English".
  • Its a proper sentence, nothing wrong.
  • I would love her to recognize the flight data I have in my inbox and see that nice plane personae
  • All those animations are just for the weather. It's not really anything new here. Just ask Cortana what is the weather like and you will see must of the icons above are just some form of weather icon.
  • Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Bar a couple icons, I've seen all of these in my daily glance or whatever it's called.
  • Exactly, showing weather is hardly a persona. Clippy is the only image that represents another persona.
  • Likewise with the different variations of Cortana's circle. I've seen nearly all of them.
  • *yawn* Waiting for the music update!
  • +720 in waiting for IE update too its has many bugs. That is possible only when they will update the operating system.
  • Boo hoo, no Cortana from Halo!
  • After wp8.1 update I have stopped using google forever except porn
  • Bing does po rn..lol
  • Okay I didn't knew. End of google search now. Thanks
  • Aashish13 and Montpbm; "priceless" Both of Y'all got to stop, almost got me fired at work, cracked me up laughing my ribs out aloud at work.
  • I think you'll find Bing's video search is far superior than Google's in that regard...
  • Just remember to turn off safe search
  • Far far far better, Bing video search just won my friend a bet on a specific video search. I was the bet loser.
  • What were you betting?
  • Lol, what was on bet was not as interesting as whet we were betting on. Even google or you failed for a specific video that was circulating in whatsapp. we entered some keyowrdsbib bing and that video turned up as first result. too bad the orig link was taken down. But Nokia's PlayTo came to rescue and we still enjoyed the video on full screen ;)
  • ~~~such mystery~~~
  • When will dev preview get the 2nd update like we had got with gdr3 dev preview?
  • Awesome
  • I just get her to say anything. When I open her, why doesn't she say hello father.
  • Lol!! You mean cant get her right?? Lol!! Are you her father??? Lol!!!
  • That's right! She should know who her daddy is and that's FATHER!
  • Actually, Cortana tipped me to another article about this early today.
  • Nietzsche.
  • Excellent combination... Well done Microsoft
  • Make master chief