As well as bundling their virtual assistant Cortana into Windows 10, the latest report is that it will also be offered as a standalone app for iOS and Android.
Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, said:
“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”.
He did however decline to comment on any plans to take Cortana outside of the Window environment, but Reuters claim that this is exactly Microsoft’s roadmap.
What Microsoft seem to be doing, and this can be seen with their Office products, is capitalise on their software and make it universal across platforms – much how Windows started; it didn’t matter what hardware you were running, Windows worked on top of it. With Windows Phone taking a solid third in the smartphone market and no sign of them competing for second place, Microsoft can change their strategy to make these numbers work in their favour.
So it makes perfect sense for Cortana to come to Android, but the question remains – will anyone use it?
Yes, after a while of using Windows Phone, I got tired of all of the non official apps and the official app developers blocking those apps. But something that I miss since I switched back from Windows Phone to Android is Cortana. I’ve used Siri and she’s not that smart and I HATE, REPEAT HATE, Google Now. I was able to set up Cortana to search all search engines and Data Bases across the web. I would definitely use Cortana on Android. Or even on iPhone.