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The battle of the virtual personal assistants could be about to heat up, with reports that Microsoft’s Cortana is set to make the jump to Android and iOS.
In an area of the market where Microsoft has struggled for some time – smartphones – its voice assistant is widely regarded by many to be the best of the three. Going one step further than Apple’s Siri, which can answer questions and set reminders, Cortana adds context to these – reminding you to leave for the airport if you have a flight to catch for example.
Cortana has regularly performed well in face-offs with other assistants too.
According to Reuters the move will see a new, standalone app launched on both iOS and Android for Cortana, giving users the chance to try the currently Windows-only software for themselves. It would be quite a seismic shift in this area of smartphone technology given that so far, virtual assistants have chosen to stay native.
However it does follow a plan laid out by Microsoft chief Satya Nadella, who has spoken in the past of branching out some of Microsoft’s services to users on other platforms. This has already begun to happen with Office, the company’s productivity suite, with the Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps going free on Apple’s iOS for the first time.
This would not be Cortana’s first big migration in recent times either: at a Windows 10 preview event in January, the software was confirmed as a presence on the desktop of the latest version of the PC software, which is due out later this year.
Cortana is named after the artificial intelligence system in the Microsoft-owned Halo gaming franchise.
Though there has been no official comment from Microsoft on the matter, the news comes as part of a wider report that suggests the Seattle-based tech giant is working on a new advanced version of Cortana with the codename “Einstein”.
