The fate of Cortana now seems to be sealed. From January 31, 2020, Microsoft will stop supporting the Android and iOS app of its voice assistant
Cortana, Microsoft's voice assistant, will soon go into early retirement. Starting from 2020, the iOS and Android app will no longer be available in several countries around the world, thus putting an end to a project/experiment that hasn't had the strength - nor the luck, in some ways - to exploit the full potential of the market.
It's Microsoft itself to announce the news, although it had already been in the air for quite some time. In the past months, in fact, the Redmond company had already given some warning in this sense. In particular, Microsoft and Amazon have been working on an integration of their two voice assistants (Cortana and Alexa) for some time now, with the latter ready to land on Windows 10 computers as well.
Cortana: end of app support
From next January 31, 2020, support for Cortana (in Android and iOS versions) will be discontinued in Germany, Spain, the UK, Canada, Australia, China, India and, finally, Mexico. Those who use the "reminders" and "lists" features created exclusively with Cortana can back up using the "Microsoft To Do" app, available for iOS and Android.
The Future of Cortana
In the beginning it was Apple's Siri, followed by Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana, with Google Assistant coming in last. But in this struggle between giants, Microsoft's artificial intelligence assistant - the only one not specifically tied to a product, smart speaker or smartphone - was the first to give way. Goodbye (or, at least, goodbye) to the ambitions of confronting openly with Google Assistant and Alexa on the mobile platform and a clear change of strategy compared to the past. Apparently, in fact, Cortana should become the "voice" of the cloud productivity platform "Microsoft 365" and give support to professionals who use the software of the house of Redmond.