Cortana + Alexa = Google Assistant
During the first keynote address to kick of Microsoft Build Conference 2018, CEO Satya Nadella announced that Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana will now work with Amazon’s Alexa. To demonstrate them coming together, Megan Saunders, Microsoft’s General Manager of Cortana started talking to an Echo. She asked Alexa to add milk to her shopping list and then ordered Amazon’s assistant to ask Cortana about her day. Right then, the voice changed and the similarly toned female voice of Cortana came up to read out the calendar appointments of the day. The walls started coming down. The two assistants were no longer strangers to each other. They had become a team.
Taking the demo even further, Saunders asked Cortana to send an email to Tom Taylor, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Alexa. Taylor, who was on stage with Saunders, saw the email on his Outlook on a PC and asked Cortana there to look up the location of a restaurant. After that, he asked Cortana to Open Alexa and book an Uber to the location. Once again, the voice changed and Alexa did as asked. Lastly, Taylor commanded Alexa to “turn off the lights” and headed out.
Cortana + Alexa = Google Assistant
Roughly ten minutes of demonstrations and Saunders and Taylor had successfully demonstrated how two individual AI assistants can work in tandem, bringing us closer to a Jarvis-like personality that will be present both at your workplace and at home to manage everything from your emails to your appliances and entertainment. It’s a utopic idea, yes, but what’s the need for it? More importantly, why would you want to use Cortana and Alexa at the same time?
Let’s start with the first question. To give a simple answer — The powers of Alexa and Cortana combined is somewhat equal to the Google Assistant. Thanks to its overpowering presence on the internet, Google can and does have the ability to answer your queries, manage your day, play your music and control your smart appliances. The Google Assistant also has a wider presence as Android happens to be the most popular operating system with over two billion active users across the world. On the other hand, Cortana has reportedly 141 million monthly active users as of 2017 while an estimated 1.6-3 million Echo devices are currently active across the world. The number of people using the two smart assistants does not even come close to the presence of Google Assistant.
However, by becoming a team, Alexa and Cortana can offer more functionalities to users who depend on an Echo device for home automation and while at work, use Cortana to streamline their workflow. By combining the abilities of two assistants, Alexa and Cortana can a vast set of personalisation and automation features that can pose a big threat to Google’s presence. Of course, Google won’t be sitting still, and come today’s I/O Keynote, more abilities and functionalities will come to the Assistant.
Bring down the walled garden
Which brings us to the question, what exactly do the two coming together mean for a user? Alexa is good at controlling your smart home appliances,while Cortana takes care of your work. Alexa lets you shop online and is present across the majority of smart speakers, and even some smart screens. There are over 25,000 Alexa skills that make the voice assistant one of the most versatile out there. Cortana, on the other hand, resides in your Windows PC. It signs you in, reads and sends emails for you, check your calendar, translate foreign languages in real time, performs calculations and conversions, track flights and packages, and the usual tasks of getting directions, setting a reminder, and more. Combining the two gives you an all-encompassing ability to control the majority of things that your life centres around. Although, it will ultimately come down to how well Amazon and Microsoft manage to integrate the two assistants together.
Who needs the other more?
Alexa is the most popular AI assistant in smart speakers. Which means anyone interested in home automation has one. Cortana is practically present in every Windows PCs. Both have their strongholds and them coming together gives each other access to their territories. To put that in context, Google Assistant is not available on PCs and Alexa-enabled speakers don’t allow Google services to run on them. Only a hardcore mobile user or a Google loyalist, as a result, would like to depend on Google Assistant as a digital butler. As a result, Alexa and Cortana have a vice grip on two major ecosystems individually and coming together means they each have a share of the other’s territory. Then again, PCs aren’t the future and Cortana needs better integration with devices other than desktops to survive in the near future. Alexa already has the popularity and a wide number of skills. Making Cortana work in tandem with Alexa’s abilities will only make Cortana stronger. On the flipside, Alexa needs Cortana tin order to be seen as a serious AI tool that can move beyon just your bedroom. Currently, it’s seen more as an entertainment device that can play music, tell jokes, book movie tickets, and control appliances. By coming together, Alexa can be present at your workplace as well, learning from Cortana to handle your work-centric tasks like sending emails, and managing appointments and the likes. More presence means more interaction, and to strip it down, it means that getting things done at home and work, more efficiently. In a world where Google has a massive advantage, Cortana and Alexa need to do everything they can to match up to Google, which includes working together.
If all this is making you excited, then hold on to your horses. There’s no confirmed date for when this collaboration will become a reality. It’s also not known whether the existing lineup of Alexa-enabled devices will be updated to support Cortana, although it would be only logical to do so.
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Subhrojit Mallick
Eats smartphones for breakfast. View Full Profile
