Microsoft is working to release a standalone app of Cortana digital assistant on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. We heard last year of such a plan, but today Reuters states that Microsoft is building a standalone app for phones and tablets running iOS and Android.
Cortana has been part of Windows Phone for a while, and now the company is bringing its personal assistant to Windows 10, and it’s likely Apple and Google devices will get the assistant this year as well.
Microsoft Research is building a smarter version of Cortana, which is internally known as “Einstein” that can query data from an artificial intelligence. The information available at this time is very thin, but it seems this is an effort to make the personal assistant more capable of automating tasks.
During an interview with Reuters, Eric Horvitz, managing director of the Microsoft Research said that the next version of Cortana will play a bigger role later this year. “This kind of technology, which can read and understand email, will play a central role in the next roll out of Cortana, which we are working on now for the fall time frame” Horvitz says.
This is an expected move from Microsoft, and it represents an effort to expand its software and services to more devices and platforms, rather than trying to force customers into using Windows. We’ve already seen other attempts such as OneDrive and Office 365 as services available virtually everywhere.
While Cortana is one of the big features in Windows Phone and soon it will be an important feature in Windows 10, having the personal assistant everywhere will help the company to keep improving the service and make Cortana even more relevant.
Source Reuters
