Microsoft has killed its standalone Cortana app on Windows 11. The company previously announced that the app would be discontinued in late 2023.

Microsoft has killed its standalone Cortana app on Windows 11. If you have the app installed on your PC, Microsoft has just released a new update that will make it display a message explaining that it’s now been deprecated (via Windows Latest).

Back in June, Microsoft warned that it would stop supporting Cortana as a standalone app in Windows 11 and Windows 10 in “late 2023,” but we’re already there. If the Cortana app no longer works on Windows 11, Cortana remains available as a “productivity assistant” in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams displays, and Microsoft Teams rooms.

Cortana first launched on Windows Phone 8.1 back in 2014, and Microsoft brought it to Windows 10 PCs a year later. Unfortunately, the voice assistant never enjoyed the same momentum as Alexa or the Google Assistant, and except for the Harman Kardon Invoke, there was no interest from third-party manufacturers to include Cortana in their products.

In recent years, Microsoft tried to focus on productivity use cases for Cortana, but the writing was already on the wall. Despite the end of support for Cortana on Windows, Panos Panay, Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer said at CES earlier this year that AI was “going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows.” This bold claim is already starting to materialize with Microsoft’s various “Copilot” products built with OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology.

  • @[email protected]English
    5•1 year ago

    My guess is, they killing cortana because of their copilot software, which is basically the same - but better. They would heave to maintain basically the same product, so they dumped it.

    As i see it, using a computer, smartphone or any other device with your voice has a lot of benefits and is used a lot around the world. But it is used in a different scenario than a mouse/keyboard is used and i’m pretty sure they are aware of it. Even they don’t see people sitting at their desk talking to their computer all day long.

    I agree, they will probably kill off copilot in the next few OS and replace it with something different. They want to be competitive with software from other vendors, so they jump to the “next new thing”.