It’s the end of an era for Microsoft

Microsoft has deactivated its Cortana application for Windows 11. While the personal assistant had already been killed on Android and iOS, it is on the firm’s operating system that it is no longer. For Microsoft, the future is elsewhere and it’s called Bing Chat.

Cortana still exists, although she has been in a coma for several years, between life and death, having failed to find success one day. Microsoft resigns itself to stopping it on its most important support, as had been planned for a few weeks: Windows 11. It is no longer possible to use the voice assistant from the operating system. Fortunately, the OS editor has other projects in mind.

The Cortana Update… That Kills Cortana

It’s the media The Verge which reports a final update to Cortana on Windows 11. As it rolls out, it’s pretty straightforward as it disables the digital assistant. An end of service which comes three years after the death of Cortana on iOS and Android. As a reminder, Cortana arrived in 2014 on Windows Phone, before arriving on Windows 10 the following year.

However, this assistant has always been worse than its competitors like Alexa or Google Assistant. In the end, Satya Nadella himself, the CEO of Microsoft, had recognized that Cortana was less good than its competitors. For a few years, it seems that Cortana has been gradually invisible on Windows 11. For example, the assistant had been removed from the taskbar as well as from the system configuration.

The app is still accessible, but launching it will display a message that Cortana is disabled. Clicking on ” Learn more we are taken to a Microsoft support page. On this one, we learn that ” Cortana on Windows as a standalone app is deprecated “. In addition, Microsoft announces that it will deactivate the assistant on Microsoft Teams this fall, but that it will continue to work on the mobile version of Outlook. If the company takes the opportunity to recall the existence of voice access in Windows 11, its desires and its projects are resolutely in artificial intelligence.

After Cortana, Bing Chat and the Copilot

Disabling Cortana in Windows 11 is also an opportunity for Microsoft to promote its services based on generative AI. At the head of the gondola, the ” new Bing “, also called Bing Chat. It allows to summarize web pages, to answer questions from search results. It is accessible from the Windows Copilot, available for the moment in preview and aims to replace Cortana in the long term.

Another ongoing project: Microsoft 365 Copilot. It is also an assistant, but who wants to be more intelligent. Microsoft indicates that this Copilot ” uses your Microsoft 365 data, such as your calendar, email, chats, documents, and meetings, to help you create, edit, share content, and more. »

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