Can you imagine this:

You promised your girlfriend/boyfriend last week, in an email, that you’d accompany him/her to the gym (you put on a ton of weight over the holidays). You never made it to the appointment.

“I forgot,” you tell your loved one.

“Impossible,” is the reply you’re met with. “Cortana would have reminded you.”

This is a possible scenario if you decide to allow Microsoft’s digital assistant freedom to roam around your PC, letting you know what you’ve forgotten, promised and abandoned. Part of Microsoft’s update for Windows 10, first to members of the Insider Program and later to all Windows 10 users, is making Cortana a little bit more indispensable in that she will make sure you meet all your commitments. The voice assistant will do this by scanning your emails.

In a blog post describing how Cortana can help you meet all your commitments, Marcus Ash, group program manager of Cortana, said, “Microsoft Research (MSR) was pursuing an intriguing and powerful idea around this challenge — automatically recognizing when people make commitments to one another in email messages and providing reminders.”

The feature, if used solely for work purposes could prove very useful. Think of all those deadlines you’ve missed, appointments you’ve forgotten about, projects you said you’d start but got lost under thousands of emails. Less formally, think about how many parties, coffees, movies you’ve forgotten about, people you never picked up, or concerts you said you’d go to but only remembered when it was too late. Personally speaking, many of us need a digital assistant.

A problem, of course — as mentioned above — is that there will be little excuse for forgetting anything. Users will undoubtedly have the option to turn off Cortana’s commitment function, but employees, or even lovers, might not be keen on that idea. The irony is: The better Cortana gets, the more help it offers, the more gratitude you will have for your assistant. But at the same time there will always be a certain amount of freedom you lose and certainly less room for mistakes on your part.

The current update is available to Windows Insiders in the U.S. and U.K. only, but it’s likely it will become widely available soon.

Photo credit: Cary Bass-Deschenes via Flickr