Microsoft has received several positive reviews for its highly-capable Cortana digital assistant and now the company has bigger plans in mind. In an interview with Reuters, Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, revealed interesting future plans for Cortana.
Besides the technical advancement in the upcoming Cortana version, Microsoft is considering cross-platform integration on Android and iOS mobile operating systems. The news is still off-record as it comes from people familiar with the ongoing project, Reuters exclusively reports.
Although Cortana's arrival on Android and iOS is yet to be confirmed by the company officials, there is a lot of interesting stuff underway for Microsoft's digital assistant. According to Horvitz, the next Cortana version will take advantage of Microsoft's AI (artificial intelligence) to read and understand emails and notify about important things you discussed such as flight schedule.
"We're defining the competitive landscape... of who can provide the most supportive services that make life easier, keep track of things, that complement human memory in a way that helps us get things done," Horvitz said during his interview with Reuters.
Horvitz is part of project Einstein, which is responsible for Cortana's improvements by integrating AI. The name of the project was inspired by Albert Einstein's incredible discovery of relationship between space and time, Horvitz noted.
But it would be interesting to see Cortana arrive on rival platforms, which already have exclusive digital assistants such as Siri and Google Now. Siri is responsive and responds to users' queries by looking up via Microsoft's Bing search and taps into GPS data, contacts and messages as well. Google Now, on the other hand, can extract information from Gmail to set reminders in addition to the usual voice assistance.
Microsoft has already confirmed that Siri will be deeply integrated into its Windows 10 OS, which is set to launch for consumers later this year. There's no information on when and how Cortana will arrive on iOS and Android but we can expect it to happen sometime after the Windows 10 release.
