Over the past week, IFTTT has added 3 new channels to its hundreds of supported services for smart integrations and automations. Two of them are little known: SURY Assistant and ELA Smart Lighting, but the third one is quite important: Cortana.

Like the Google Assistant and Alexa channels, the new Cortana one has dozens of applets you can instantly try, as well as 4 triggers available: say a specific phrase, say a phrase with number, say a phrase with text, say a phrase with number and text. There are no actions available, so you can't make your Wemo slow cooker for example notify you through Cortana when it's done cooking. You can, however, ask Cortana to set a specific cooking time on the Wemo slow cooker.

To give it a go, you need to have an IFTTT account, which at this point is really worth having given how many possible links it creates between services and apps that normally don't talk together, then you connect your Cortana account and you're ready to use a ready-made applet or create your own.