End of Microsoft assistant. The company said goodbye to Cortana
Microsoft finally got rid of Cortana. The earlier design of the assistant, somewhat similar to Apple Siri, was heavily overshadowed by ChatGPT and Bing AI. In August, the giant officially ended support for the project.
Microsoft officially announced the end of the Cortana project. The company’s voice assistant has been in development for nearly 10 years, but has never found many dedicated users.
Microsoft ends Cortana – the application loses support
We heard the first information about turning off Cortana in June this year. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that Cortana would soon be phased out and would say goodbye to users forever in August.
Now the announced date has officially struck. Microsoft changed the documentation for its products. It states that Cortana is no longer supported as a standalone application on Windows. At the same time, the company urges Internet users to check other productivity solutions supported by AI algorithms that are available directly in Windows (including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Windows Copilot) or Microsoft Edge browser (Bing AI).
At the same time, some assistant functions will be preserved in other applications. These include Outlook Mobile, Teams Mobile, Microsoft Teams or Microsoft Teams Rooms.
Cortana – the personal assistant that didn’t catch on
Interestingly, Cortana remained in the Microsoft ecosystem for quite a long time, despite not being very popular on the market. The system was presented for the first time in 2014 and was immediately given its recognizable name – AI Cortana is one of the most important characters in the Halo series of games.
The application hit the market in 2015 – for Windows 10 and Android and iOS smartphones, and then for the Xbox One console. Already in 2017, the company set a new path for Cortana – the service ceased to be a direct competition for voice assistants such as Siri (Apple) or Alexa (Amazon).
In 2020, the retreat from the application began. Cortana was first removed from the Xbox system. In 2021, the application for mobile devices disappeared. The weight of the service was also gradually reduced in Windows 11 until the last time the application was disabled for all users.
