Cortana is an app not a standalone assistant: Satya Nadella

Officials at Microsoft have invested their one year working on the public repositioning of Cortana from standalone digital assistant to assistance aide. This week Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella officially confirmed that Cortana is going to be an app, or skill, not a standalone assistant like Amazon's Alexa Google Assistant or Apple's Siri.

Earlier this week Nadella spoke to some selected journalist on the Microsoft campus. "One thing that I feel like at Microsoft we made a bunch of mistakes by just saying let's just enter every category, just because we're a software company," ZDNet quotes Nadella as saying.

"Sometimes, it's sensible to do so because there are big TAMs [total addressable markets], but at the same time, if you don't have some unique thing to contribute, you usually fail," he added.

According to Nadella speakers are an example where the company needs to stand back. He asked instead of speakers what we can do in that same category which turns to be unique.

He said "would we be better off, for example, to make Cortana a valuable skill that somebody who is using Alexa can call? Or should we try and compete with Alexa? And we decided we would do the former which is because Cortana needs to be that skill for anybody who's a Microsoft 365 subscriber. You should be able to use it on Google Assistant, you should be able to use it on Alexa, just like how you use our apps on Android and iOS so that's at least how we want to think about where it'll go."

Microsoft has not announced any partnership with Google so fat. But it does have joined hands with Amazon to get Cortana to interoperate with Google Assistant. Let's see what the company is planning to do with its Cortana.

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