Android, iOS and Windows Phone are the three biggest mobile operating systems nowadays. Each of these platforms is special in a way, and they function differently, but they have lots of things in common as well. Each of these OS’ has a dedicated digital assistant, which also function significantly different one from another. Google Now has been a part of Android for a while now, same can be said about Siri which is a part of Apple’s iOS. Microsoft has its own personal assistant on the company’s Windows Phone platform, and it’s called Cortana. Well, it seems like Microsoft intends to bring Cortana to iOS and Android in the future, read on.
Cortana will be arriving to PCs along with Windows 10 in the autumn, but it seems like Microsoft plans to expand the availability of their personal assistant even further, Reuters reports. “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,” said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, in a recent interview.
The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, brought a lot of changes to the company since he arrived, including the expansion of availability of Microsoft’s services. Even despite Nadella’s recent moves, very few people could have expected something like this will follow. Microsoft quite obviously has big plans for Cortana, and it will be interesting to see what happens next. Keep in mind that this is not an official confirmation by the company though.
Microsoft has all kinds of side projects running at the moment, and the company believes that working on speech recognition, search and machine learning is the key to success. They believe that an intelligent personal assistant is the future, and are pushing a lot of effort into developing Cortana. As a side note, Microsoft is also working on an another artificial intelligence project called “Einstein”, which we don’t know much about at the moment.
It remains to be seen what happens next, but it seems like Microsoft intends to bring Cortana to Android and iOS in a form of a separate app. We’re waiting for some sort of an official confirmation, and will report back when we get some additional info regarding all this.