Finally, the time has arrived when the two most popular voice-controlled digital assistants, Alexa from Amazon and Cortana from Microsoft, are joining hands. Soon, you will be able to communicate with Cortana using Alexa and vice versa, hopefully by the end of this year.
This partnership seems a bit odd but it’s true. Both the companies have been working very secretly for more than a year on this project of making both the digital assistants communicate with each other.
As reported by The New York Times,
“The Amazon-Microsoft partnership started in May 2016, when Bezos raised the idea with Nadella at Microsoft’s CEO Summit, an annual event for business leaders in the Seattle area. Nadella was receptive to the idea, so a short while later, Bezos emailed a draft of a brief news release that described how their assistants would work together, both men said.”
Almost every IT giant today has its digital assistant but this partnership is kind of rare because it brings together two cut-throat competitors. The companies claim that each assistant has its unique strength. United, they can serve the world better and will open new possibilities in the field of AI. “People would turn to different digital assistants the same way they turn to one friend for advice about hiking and another for restaurant recommendations.”, said Jeff Bezos the CEO of Amazon during an interview recently.
“Alexa customers will be able to access Cortana’s unique features like booking a meeting or accessing work calendars, reminding you to pick up flowers on your way home, or reading your work email – all using just your voice. Similarly, Cortana customers can ask Alexa to control their smart home devices, shop on Amazon.com, interact with many of the more than 20,000 skills built by third-party developers, and much more.”
Well, this is a good initiative by Microsoft and Amazon, however, there is no news of Apple or Google being the part of the same but who knows what’s hidden in the shadow of future. We hope that techies will welcome this partnership wholeheartedly and we will see more of this kind of developments in near future.