Cortana is, in my opinion, the best voice assistant on the market. Even though Cortana is not officially available in Kenya, I had a chance to play with it a while back and I have to say that it is really good, better than Apple’s Siri and Google Now.
Microsoft apparently wants to bring the Cortana’s experience to Android and iOS users. The company wants to build Cortana to be a standalone app that can be downloaded to other platforms apart from Windows Phones. Reuters has been quoted saying,
“Later, Cortana will be available as a standalone app, usable on phones and tablets powered by Apple Inc’s iOS and Google Inc’s Android, people familiar with the project said.”
My appeal to Microsoft is for them to make Cortana available to all Windows Phone users before rolling out to Android and iOS devices. Cortana is available in very few markets and it will not make sense to roll it out to other platforms before all windows phone users can get it.
Microsoft is keen to bring more features to Cortana instead of making it a plain voice assistant. According to Horvitz, “This kind of technology, which can read and understand email, will play a central role in the next roll out of Cortana, which we are working on now for the fall time frame.”
Microsoft did not give a timeline of when we should expect these apps on the different platforms so I cannot make any guesses at this time.
