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Microsoft wants Cortana to be Alexa's friend, not enemy

Written by Matti Robinson @ 20 Jan 2019 9:06

Microsoft wants Cortana to be Alexa's friend, not enemy

Microsoft is working on some voice assistant changes, as is evident from recently revealing that search bar and Cortana are going to be separated in Windows 10.
There's much more happening behind the scenes, though. Not long ago, Cortana boss Javier Soltero left Microsoft, and perhaps that was beginning of the end for Microsoft's Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant competitor.

Now Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella no longer wants to consider Cortana directly opposite to Alexa and Assistant. According to Nadella, it is more important that Cortana is a service that works on all platforms and supports all kinds of devices, and more importantly even support the other assistants.

Nadella's thought of not competing but complimenting other assistants might be beautiful, but why would Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa user ever want to, or have to, use Cortana on their own platforms?

It does sound a little like Microsoft just threw in the towel because they couldn't or don't want to compete in hardware like the smart speakers.



Perhaps Microsoft does have some tricks up its sleeve on how to differentiate Cortana from the rest. Microsoft does have strong partnership with Amazon, so maybe it can warm Google up to some kind of collaboration.

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