Microsoft Is Trying To Keep Its Voice Assistant Cortana Around

Even though voice assistants from Apple, Google, and Amazon have won made their presence and gained popularity everywhere around the world, Microsoft won’t give up on its Cortana.

Last month, a patent application filed by Microsoft was published which describes in detail how the company will incorporate Cortana into third-party apps better.

Microsoft stated that it wants a client to expose a service and an interface that allows third-party apps to get integrated with the assistant. While a lot of third-party apps have integrated with Cortana, Microsoft’s new patent will help developers add the voice assistant’s features, such as text-to-speech, voice recognition, as well as app-specific controls.

More importantly, users will be able to gain more control instead of just Microsoft apps, which may draw more people into using the voice assistant.

Microsoft created and released Cortana in April 2014. The virtual voice assistant can work with Windows Phone 8.1, Windows 10 Mobile, Windows 10, Microsoft Band, Invoke smart speaker, Xbox One, Surface Headphones, Windows Mixed Reality, Android, iOS, and Amazon Alexa.

Cortana's main features include setting reminders, recognizing a natural voice without requiring a keyboard input, and answering questions by giving information that it collects from Microsoft's Bing search engine. The voice assistant also supports several languages including English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Last month, to make it more convenient to use Cortana on desktop devices, Microsoft decided to split up the voice assistant and search, which means Cortana will have its own icon attached to the taskbar. With this change, users will have a far better in-house search experience and just by clicking on Cortana icon, they will go straight to the voice assistant.

When Microsoft paired its voice assistant with the search feature on Windows, it made sense for engineers but not for users as the voice assistant automatically launches whenever they delete the words entered in the search box.