Windows 10 laptop keyboards to integrate Cortana button

To paraphrase Marvel’s agent Phil Coulson from the first Avengers movie, “...people might just need a little old-fashioned...”, and tech giant Toshiba is about to bring to laptop users a feature which, whether intentionally or otherwise, could make them feel like turning the clock back to a time where an office assistants would be only a push of the Intercom away, ready for the next task.

A Cortana button is definitely in the cards for the next laptops manufactured by Toshiba, and HP could follow suit as well, in a move that could encourage more users to take advantage of Microsoft’s virtual assistant.

At this very advanced stage of Windows 10’s development, Cortana is currently available via a Win+C keyboard shortcut, aside from clicking in the Cortana search box directly. While using keyboard shortcuts can be a relatively easy habit to get into, it’s not intuitive enough for users to embrace, and the addition of a special key would create a more natural way to access Cortana, just as it happened when the Windows key was introduced in Windows 95.

By this same token, the Cortana key could very well become the next huge change in future keyboard layouts for PCs, as the role of virtual assistants becomes more relevant to PC users.

The change could affect not only laptops and desktop PCs, but also Windows 10 tablets like the Windows Surface Pro, and perhaps even extend to other operating systems and manufacturers in the future as a universal feature, like the Windows button, which is universally adopted across many third party operating systems, especially Linux-based OS's.