Monday, August 7, 2023

End of Support for Cortana in Windows

Microsoft (via Hacker News):

Starting in August 2023, we will no longer support Cortana in Windows as a standalone app. However, you can still access powerful productivity features in Windows and Edge, which have increased AI capabilities.

[…]

This change only impacts Cortana in Windows, and your productivity assistant, Cortana, will continue to be available in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams rooms.

I guess Windows Copilot has a totally different backend than Cortana, but if it takes text as input I wonder why they don’t do text-to-speech and let you control it by voice.

Filipe Espósito:

According to Windows Latest, Cortana is also expected to be shut down on previous versions of Windows in the coming weeks.

[…]

Seeing what other companies are achieving with generative AI, I do think it’s time for Apple to give up on Siri and focus its efforts on new technologies.

It seems like in this case Microsoft is doing things the Apple way (making a clean break) and Apple is doing things the Microsoft way (improving the old technology).

Sören Nils Kuklau:

Cortana is being shut down because not enough cared about it for Microsoft to find some monetization scheme.

Siri, meanwhile, is used by plenty of people every day, and Apple just subsidizes it through hardware sales.

Previously:

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