To No One’s Surprise, Microsoft’s Cortana Is Officially Dead

To No One’s Surprise, Microsoft’s Cortana Is Officially Dead

In case you forgot (which I bet you did): Microsoft once had a digital assistant in the form of Cortana, inspired by the same-name character (who’s an AI) in the company’s popular Halo franchise. It launched with little fanfare, and after many years of struggling and convincing that ended up fruitless (and found out that Bing AI actually works better), the company is finally pulling the plug on the voice assistant this month.

Actual Cortana (in Halo 5: Guardians).

The company’s support page has mentioned that Cortana as a standalone app is no longer supported (as seen here), so Windows 10 users who still rely on the assistant will soon be out of luck. Windows 11 meanwhile has transitioned to the new and much superior Bing AI and is still on track to add more features around the GPT-powered chatbot.

Image: Reddit

However, the documentation mentions that Cortana in “Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams rooms” will continue to operate for the foreseeable future. Only Windows itself is affected by the latest change, although Microsoft’s 365 Copilot feature may take over Cortana’s duties in these places at some point in the future.

Cortana started out back in 2014 as part of Windows 10, in hopes to compete with Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri voice assistant. However, Microsoft was significantly late to the voice assistant battle, and CEO Satya Nadella has gone as far to say the now-deprecated voice assistant (alongside other non AI-powered ones like Alexa) is “dumb as a rock” during the launch of Bing AI early this year.

Source: PCMag

Pokdepinion: Unsurprising – the moment Bing AI was a thing, it’s bound to be discontinued at some point.