Microsoft has filed another patent (via Windows United) on making Cortana easier and more natural to use. This one is about being more intelligent with messages.
The image above pretty much lays out what this is all about. The voice assistant is saying that the user has an email from their boss, an email to check in for a flight, and a message requesting the resume. In doing so, the voice assistant is summarizing each of the messages, rather than reading through the whole thing. It"s also intelligent enough to know who the user"s boss is, and then it will be able to respond when they say, "What does my boss want?"
The assistant will be able to collect messages from a variety of sources, rather than just email, turning the voice assistant into a communications hub. The meaning of the message is then determined, and then it creates a score for the message to generate the summary.
As always, it"s just a patent, and it"s unclear if this will ever make it into a real-world product. Microsoft has been focusing on improving Cortana"s conversational abilities over the last couple of years though, so this seems like something it would be working on.