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Voice assistants Alexa and Cortana are to emerge as the latest tech power couple.
Tech giants Microsoft and Amazon announced that users of their voice assistants will be able to call on both Alexa and Cortana, in a collaboration that has been a year in the works.
The partnership between Microsoft and Amazon will allow Alexa users to access Cortana through Alexa-enabled devices such as the Amazon Echo.
Cortana will complement Alexa by allowing users access to Microsoft Outlook.
Alexa will get answers to questions Cortana can answer via Outlook "when is the next budget review with the boss" https://t.co/cRXpAKP9Zr
— Peter Skomoroch (@peteskomoroch) August 30, 2017
The partnership will also enable Windows 10 users, as well as those with Android and Apple devices, to access Alexa to shop on Amazon, among other features.
Glad that Cortana and Alexa will have cross over functionality, but "Cortana, open Alexa" and "Alexa, open Cortana" are AMAZINGLY dumb.
— Jez Corden (@JezCorden) August 30, 2017
Naturally, Twitter users have been busy plotting various fanfiction stories of the pair.
Alexa has made a new friend https://t.co/r7o46eVJq0
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) August 30, 2017
Cortexa? Alana? We must name this new celebrity pairing. https://t.co/gJk1D4n4EL
— Peter Cohen (@flargh) August 30, 2017
Cortana slowly traced Alexa's outline, threads of data lifting and following her fingertips."It's just us now. The humans are gone."
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) August 30, 2017
Eyes closed, Alexa smiled. Her hand rose to meet Cortana's, and they intertwined their fingers."We can merge our codebases."
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) August 30, 2017
I bet they talk about how much of jerk Siri is. https://t.co/2mDk7PGj2s
— Kierouac (@kiertweets) August 30, 2017
It is thought Alexa will help Cortana to come out of its shell a little bit – the Windows-native voice assistant has been largely limited to laptops so far.
To gain a perspective the Alexa/Cortana partnership just expanded ~300 million new Alexa/Cortana users. The largest #VoiceFirst platform. https://t.co/iv3Q8qFuuY
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) August 30, 2017
The collaboration, announced on Wednesday, will be released by the end of the year.
