Why is Cortana being discontinued?
Cortana is Microsoft’s virtual assistant technology that was first introduced in 2014 alongside Windows Phone 8.1. It was designed to compete with other virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant. Cortana was named after an artificial intelligence character from Microsoft’s Halo video game franchise.
When Cortana first launched, it received positive reviews for having more features and capabilities than competitors like Siri, including being able to interact conversationally and understand natural language voice commands. However, despite the initial praise, Cortana struggled to gain widespread consumer adoption. Part of the problem was Cortana’s close integration with Windows Phone, which had limited market share compared to iOS and Android.
Lack of Consumer Adoption
Despite being one of the early entrants in the digital assistant market, Cortana struggled to gain traction with consumers compared to competitors like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. According to Statista, in 2017 Alexa had 62% market share while Google Assistant accounted for 23%, leaving Cortana with just over 2%.
Some key reasons consumers never fully embraced Cortana include:
- Limited device integration – Unlike Alexa which worked across Amazon’s growing ecosystem of products, Cortana was largely restricted to Microsoft devices.
- Fewer capabilities – Cortana lagged behind in supporting popular smart home devices and third party skills.
- Minimal marketing – Microsoft did little to promote Cortana to general consumers compared to Amazon and Google’s marketing pushes.
Without a strong footing among average users, Cortana lacked the data and feedback needed to rapidly improve through machine learning. This made it difficult to close the capability gap as competitors continued advancing their assistants. As a result, Cortana’s market share dwindled over time.
Focus Shift to Enterprise
In recent years, Microsoft made a strategic decision to shift the focus of Cortana away from consumer applications and more towards enterprise and productivity scenarios. As reported by S&P Global Market Intelligence in March 2020, Microsoft was scaling back the consumer-facing capabilities of Cortana in order to double down on business use cases.
As explained on Microsoft’s website, Cortana was enhanced with new features tailored specifically for enterprise users, such as calendar management, email triaging, and integrations with Microsoft 365 and other business applications. The goal was to position Cortana as a productivity assistant within Microsoft 365 to help streamline workflows and tasks for workplace productivity.
According to an article on Microsoft’s site, the enterprise version of Cortana meets the same stringent privacy, security, and compliance standards as other Microsoft 365 services. This shift in strategy allowed Microsoft to focus Cortana on scenarios where it provided the most utility for business customers.
While consumer skills and third-party integrations were deprecated, Microsoft continued developing Cortana as an AI-powered productivity tool for enterprises. This strategic realignment helped refine Cortana’s capabilities for business use cases where Microsoft saw the greatest market potential.
Technical Challenges
Cortana faced various technical challenges compared to other voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. One major issue was difficulty with speech recognition and understanding natural language commands. As this forum post notes, Cortana often struggled to accurately interpret users’ voice requests, especially in noisy environments:
Cortana also lacked more advanced natural language processing abilities compared to competitors. This made conversational interactions feel less natural. Cortana would often fail to understand context and nuance when users posed questions or gave instructions. These technical limitations hindered Cortana’s contextual awareness and ability to deliver truly intelligent assistance.
While other voice assistants leveraged deep learning and neural networks to improve over time, Cortana’s core speech and language tech apparently lagged behind. Faced with these challenges, Microsoft likely determined the investment required to catch up in AI assistant tech was not worth the payoff.
Integration Issues
One of the major challenges Cortana faced was difficulty integrating smoothly into Windows and other Microsoft products. As a digital assistant, Cortana was meant to provide helpful information and automation across documents, email, calendar appointments, and more. However, Microsoft struggled to seamlessly incorporate Cortana into its software and operating systems.
For example, Cortana experienced integration issues with Windows that led to bugs and inconsistent behavior [1]. Some users reported that Cortana would stop working entirely after Windows updates. These technical challenges made Cortana feel disjointed rather than fully baked into the OS.
Additionally, Microsoft found it difficult to integrate Cortana into its own productivity software like Office. Cortana lacked deep integration and smart features that took advantage of Office documents and data. This missed opportunity meant Cortana wasn’t able to add significant value through productivity integrations.
The inability to tightly integrate Cortana into Windows and other Microsoft products was a major factor in its lack of adoption. Without smooth, seamless integration, Cortana felt like bolted-on software rather than a truly assistive part of the experience. This hampered daily usage and prevented Cortana from reaching its full potential.
Privacy Concerns
Cortana faced some criticism over its privacy policies and data collection practices. Some privacy advocates expressed concerns that Cortana was collecting more personal data than necessary to function properly. For example, a report by Common Sense Media in 2020 noted that Cortana collected location data, contacts, calendar information, and search queries by default in Windows 10.
Compared to other digital assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, Cortana’s privacy policies were not as transparent in the early days according to critics. However, Microsoft made updates over the years to be clearer about data practices and give users more control. The company highlighted that Cortana data is not used for advertising profiling purposes.
Microsoft also faced scrutiny because certain Cortana features like voice recording analysis were enabled by default when it launched on Windows 10. Users had to opt-out of sharing voice data. Over time, Microsoft made these features opt-in only to give customers more choice up front over their privacy settings.
The Shift to New Microsoft Voice Assistance
In recent years, Microsoft has shifted its approach to voice assistance technology. Rather than relying solely on Cortana as a standalone digital assistant, Microsoft has focused on developing more capable voice AI through Azure Cognitive Services.
Azure Cognitive Services provides developers with pre-built AI capabilities like speech recognition and natural language processing. These services power voice assistant features across Microsoft’s products and services, including Windows, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 (2). This more distributed approach allows Microsoft’s voice tech to be deeply integrated across its ecosystem.
For example, Microsoft recently announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new virtual assistant for enterprise users. Copilot leverages Azure speech services to understand voice commands and assist with productivity tasks in Office apps. Unlike the consumer-focused Cortana, Copilot is designed specifically for workplace scenarios like scheduling meetings or drafting documents (1).
Microsoft is also utilizing Azure AI to develop extremely natural-sounding synthetic voices, known as Neural Text-to-Speech. These human-like voices can be integrated into chatbots, virtual agents, and other speech-enabled applications (3). The shift towards Azure voice services signifies Microsoft’s strategic focus on enterprise use cases for its AI assistant technology.
Winding Down Cortana Consumer Features
Over the past few years, Microsoft has gradually been winding down Cortana’s consumer-facing features and removing the digital assistant from certain products. In 2019, Microsoft announced it would stop supporting Cortana on iOS and Android in certain regions (TechCrunch). This marked a shift away from Cortana as a standalone digital assistant app on mobile devices. In 2021, Microsoft removed Cortana from the taskbar in Windows 10 (Microsoft Support). More recently in 2022, Cortana was removed from the initial builds of Windows 11, further indicating Microsoft’s move away from Cortana as a consumer product.
These changes over the years have steadily reduced Cortana’s consumer facing capabilities and integration into Windows. Microsoft appears to be winding down Cortana as a digital assistant for consumers, while shifting focus to its enterprise capabilities instead.
The Discontinuation Announcement
Microsoft officially announced the discontinuation of Cortana as a consumer product in June 2023. In a blog post, Microsoft stated that they would no longer support Cortana on Windows after March 2023 [1]. This includes removing Cortana from the taskbar and ending support for the Cortana app on Windows 11 [2].
The announcement came as no surprise given Microsoft’s shifting focus away from Cortana as a consumer product in recent years. Reactions to the news were mixed. Some viewed Cortana’s discontinuation as the end of an era and a botched opportunity by Microsoft. Others felt Cortana lagged behind competitors and the move made sense given Microsoft’s change in strategy.
According to Microsoft, Cortana will fully shift to a productivity assistant focused on Microsoft 365. Core capabilities will remain useful for commercial scenarios, with Cortana still supported in Outlook, Teams chat, and other Microsoft products [1].
Conclusion
There were several key reasons driving Microsoft’s decision to discontinue Cortana as a standalone digital assistant offering. The consumer-facing AI assistant market became and remains dominated by big tech rivals like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Cortana struggled to achieve significant adoption and engagement amongst everyday users. At the same time, Microsoft began prioritizing developing Cortana features tailored for business/enterprise use cases and functionality, rather than the consumer space. Cortana also faced challenges integrating with and operating across various Microsoft offerings and third party services and platforms. Privacy concerns around digital assistants accessing personal data surfaced as well over recent years.
With the writing on the wall for Cortana’s consumer prospects, Microsoft pivoted their voice and AI strategy. They made their newer Microsoft 365 voice assistant features the primary voice interaction system across Microsoft work and productivity tools. Cortana itself has been integrated more deeply into Microsoft’s cloud and Azure AI services stack as an enterprise play. While the Cortana name may live on for specific services or tools, Microsoft is clearly moving past the standalone assistant concept. Consumer digital assistants remain a strategic focus for tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and others today in the voice AI assistant landscape.