Microsoft released its new virtual assistant, Cortana, at the BUILD conference in San Francisco earlier this year, to compete with other virtual assistants for other platforms like Siri and Google Now. Now, in a statement, the company is literally confirming that they might consider bringing Cortana to other platforms as well.
Though some people like Cortona, there is this other set of crowd that hates the virtual assistant. Matt McGee from Search Engine Land has learnt that the Redmond based technology giant, Microsoft is considering to bring Cortana to other platforms, like iOS and Android. Just like the way Beats, which got acquired by Apple a few weeks ago, updated its Android app for the first time after acquisition.
Not to forget, Microsoft is not reluctant in bringing some of its core products that gives them revenue to other platform. Microsoft Office for iPad is a classic example. The industry has changed quite a bit in the last few years, and we are living at a age where there is healthy competition between the tech giants, pushing each other forward to bring themselves to the top.
Marcus Ash from Microsoft, who is a Windows Phone Group Program Manager, revealed this information during a conference recently. They quoted:
We want to scale Cortana internationally and across devices. The Android/iOS question is interesting. We’re asking, would Cortana be as effective if she didn’t have access to the details on your phone?
We’re still trying to get Cortana adopted on Windows Phone and figure out what it wants to become there.
But we’re actively talking about this.
While this is not a complete confirmation from the tech giant, we can expect this to happen at a later stage, where the entire world goes crazy over Cortana. Bringing Cortana like Google Now for iOS would not be a big game changer. But deep integration into the system would be a challenge, though this could be overcome with the new APIs that Apple released for iOS 8, during WWDC 2014.
But wait, there’s more to this news. Microsoft is also trying to monetise its new Virtual Assistant platform, Cortana. While we don’t have details about the ways in which the company is planning to monetise, we know that they are running in that direction.
On the other hand, Intel is also developing a smart software with a very small chip, that could kill Siri and its competitors.