Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s voice assistant Siri: Cortana. (Shutterstock/Piotr Swat)
At the end of 2023, Cortana will be gone. Then Microsoft will discontinue Windows support for the digital language assistant launched as Siri’s competitor. Instead, the software company is now fully relying on its ChatGPT tool Windows Copilot.
“End of support for Cortana in Windows” – this is how Microsoft profanely announces the end of its voice assistant, with which the software company once wanted to stand up to Apple’s competition Siri and Google Now.
As early as April 2021, Microsoft cut off the juice from the Cortana app for iOS and Android. Since then, use has been more or less chargeable – because you need a license for Word, Excel or PowerPoint. In addition, the end of the PC version comes as no surprise.
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the corresponding one communication According to the Windows group, the end of 2023 will see the end of the digital voice assistant as a standalone app in Windows. However, Cortana can still be used in the Microsoft programs Outlook Mobile, Teams Mobile, Microsoft Teams Viewers and Teams Rooms.
On the one hand, Microsoft proposes its Bing chat AI as a sensible replacement for Cortana. On the other hand, the AI feature Windows Copilot, which is also based on ChatGPT and was only recently presented at its developer conference Build 2023, should help users in the future.
With Windows Copilot, the Microsoft operating system is the first PC platform with centralized AI assistance. Windows Copilot is to be rolled out across the board in the fall – just before Cortana disappears, like Windows Central writes.
cortana, which was planned to be a more predictive Siri, was revealed at Build 2014. The name of the language assistant is a homage to the Microsoft game series Halo, where the character Cortana supports the players as an AI.
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Incidentally, ex-Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer would have preferred to call Cortana bingo – based on the Bing search engine. Proponents of the Cortana name won the argument by simply sitting it out.
Because Ballmer took his hat off while the name search was still undecided. Successor Satya Nadella finally gave the green light for Cortana. The name Alyx initially preferred by the Microsoft marketing team could not be assigned due to a leak.