Cortana may soon be the best digital assistant – with the help of some friends



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Opening access to Cortana to third-party material, and Windows 10 competing services like Alexa from Amazon, seemed to sound the death knell of the digital assistant of Microsoft. After its Build 2019 conference in Seattle, Washington, this movie is one of the most ingenious pieces of Microsoft.

During its conference, Microsoft announced that Cortana will soon acquire a conversational artificial intelligence (AI), which means it will be able to hold entire conversations with end users to perform more complex tasks than ever before. This is due to the work of Semantic Machines, a recent acquisition of Microsoft's focus on voice-based multitasking contextual IA.

However, this is only the tip of this iceberg.

By opening Cortana to the skills of developers and PDAs provided by competing services, like Amazon Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana is becoming the digital assistant that follows you on every device and platform you use between work and leisure.

While Cortana becomes what Microsoft calls "a smart agent," the digital assistant that you use to manage your work schedule from your workstation can be the same as the one you use to find the best route for you go on the hiking trail this weekend from your iPhone. like the best restaurants nearby to relax next. Of course, this is already possible today, but not as transparently as Microsoft claims it will work.

The digital assistant becomes your personal assistant

Based on what Microsoft has demonstrated today, both in marketing materials and in the Build 2019 show, Cortana will ingest not only third-party skills, but also third-party assistants developed with skills with which Cortana does not. is not even directly compatible.

In the same conversation with Cortana to arrange a lunch meeting in a restaurant and juggle availability, you may also want reviews of this restaurant. You can theoretically request this information from Cortana during a conversation. And, if Cortana can not get this information herself, she could get in touch with a third-party digital assistant that has not even been developed in Cortana's mind.

Cortana acts effectively as a personal assistant, makes various phone calls and performs other duties on your behalf, collaborating with third parties (for example, the local flower shop or limo service) to carry out these tasks. .

Here's an example: BMW has designed a car experience that uses its own digital assistant in conjunction with Cortana's skills via Microsoft's Azure cloud service via an LTE connection. During a live demonstration, we could see the experience of experience using the experience developed by Microsoft and on which BMW has no professional activity, like the to-do lists.

Alternatively, we could easily see Cortana accessing a device using Alexa's core skills, such as aggregating product reviews, to showcase to someone the best Amazon hair dryer in asking Cortana to buy the product.

Cortana

High hurdles to come

Of course, this great vision of truly intelligent digital assistants relies instead on the service and product manufacturers of many categories who invest in the development of digital assistants. If this is not the case, Microsoft will not have much to work on.

Fortunately, robots or PDAs are gaining popularity among technology-savvy providers of products and services. However, what does it mean for third-party Cortana-enabled devices, including iPhones and (to a much lesser extent) Android phones?

Apple is traditionally compelling on iOS when it comes to allowing system-level functions to interact with third-party applications and services, let alone interacting between applications, although it has been considerably lightened. It is likely that Apple will have even less to master this type of inter-application functions if Microsoft's vision for intelligent agent Cortana is to truly flourish.

Have platform owners adopted an ideology as open as Microsoft to allow its vision? Nothing better to put that to the test than a potentially transformative technology. If everyone opened, we could all benefit from digital assistants who truly become personal assistants, namely Cortana.

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