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.
Isn’t it weird that these companies all thought that we would speak and listen to a cortana/siri/alexa/google in the future while sitting in front of a PC. I mean those are multibillion dollar companies and they all create products that normally go through tough focus-group testings, customer analytics rounds and beta groups. They all apparently thought that this would in fact be the new Oil and the way people want to interact with a PC/Device. I dont get how they could have been so wrong. They must have knew that the focus groups do not respond well. There is absolutely no way the feedback of the cortana test group was like „they all loved it! They all want to open windows explorer via cortana and browse the web asking her stuff“. Fucking billion dollar company including it into the task bar. And now removing it again. I can’t get over it how wrong they were about what their customers want. If they failed that hard on this turf, what else did they try to push without zero vetting? What was the grand schene here? Sucking up voice data? Voice profiles? Training a database? Fear of missing out?
So weird seeing big companies all believing together in such a myth and only finding out after. And now they tell us AI is the next big thing that will change everything… I bet Windows 12 will have an AI feature that will be removed in Windows 15.
I guess at the time it at least made Microsoft seem up to date on the last trends for investors?