Over the last few months, there have been many new and exciting things which have been coming to the tech world, which could change the way we use our devices for the better. Well, one thing that has sparked my interest since the announcements of the Google Home, and the Galaxy S8, were the intelligent personal assistants. These have been getting more intelligent by the year, but more in a quiet sense. But recently, we have seen some vast improvements which really make us ask the question of what can be done with one of these assistants?
Adding skills and bots to our assistant-based experiences made me think about the potential of this type of platform. But according to a recent press conference and blog post, apparently Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, thought of this a year before I did. Yesterday, August 30th of 2017, Amazon announced that they decided to partner with Microsoft, and have their respective competing assistants, Alexa and Cortana join forces.
According to Microsoft's blog post, they believe that together, they can strengthen each other. Also, that many people, including myself, generally use more than one assistant, and it may be difficult to control anything, or be productive, if you have to duplicate your information, or just only have it on one assistant platform.
Another reason for this strange partnership is because they don't have the same type of abilities, but that is a key factor for this partnership. Alexa specializes in controlling your smart home appliances, which Cortana is more into heloing you with your PC. This way, a user of either assistant would be able to ask to talk to the other, and use it from there.
What devices would support it? Well, to answer that, it would be any of them that support either Alexa or Cortana. That would include the Amazon Echo line of products, the HTC U11, Huawei Mate 9, and many other upcoming devices, most of these are more home and personal-based. On the other hand, Cortana is currently on Windows 10 PCs, Windows Phone 8.1, Windows 10 Mobile, and even your Xbox One. The Cortana-supported platforms are more productivity and mobile-based than Alexa's.
When exactly would this be avaliable? It is currently unknown at this time frame when exactly this would be avaliable. However, Amazon informs us that this would be avaliable likely later this year. So, a lot of users of both platforms are most likely looming forward to that.
Amazon partnering with Microsoft is possibly just the first of its kind. They state that they are even willing to partner with Google for their Google Assistant, and even Apple with Siri. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella stated that he hopes that this would help others make some other cool partnerships in the new future, and he's glad to be apart of it.
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