Cortana may soon recognize different voices, a feature Alexa and Google Assistant have had since 2017. Microsoft isn’t quite giving up on Cortana, but it’s slowly transforming Cortana into something other than a general-purpose digital assistant.
Who Even Uses Cortana?
Amazon has the Echo, Google has the Google Home, and Apple has the HomePod. But did you know that Microsoft has its own Cortana speaker? The Harman Kardon Invoke features Cortana. It hasn’t caught on. In fact, it’s so unpopular that it doesn’t even rank in market share analysis of smart speakers. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Harman Kardon sold 30,000 Invokes and Amazon sold 9.7 million Echo devices. Yikes.
So who uses Cortana? Every Windows 10 PC ships with a big Cortana box next to its Start button. Microsoft has said over 150 million people use Cortana, but it’s unclear whether those people are actually using Cortana as a voice assistant or just using the Cortana box to type searches on Windows 10.
Really—in a world full of open plan offices where people have keyboards, how many people are going to talk to their PCs, even if Cortana works well? A voice assistant is much less useful on a Windows PC than it is on a smart speaker or smartphone.
Microsoft hasn’t seemed serious about pushing Cortana in recent years, either. Cortana is still only available in 13 countries, while Amazon says Alexa is supported in many, many more countries. At the end of 2017, there were only 230 Cortana skills compared to 25,000 Alexa skills. Alexa now has over 50,000 skills, leaving Cortana in the dust.
Alexa Even Runs on Windows 10
Amazon’s Alexa is even beating Cortana on Windows. Many PC manufacturers have excitedly announced Alexa integration on their new PCs, and now there’s an official Alexa app any Windows 10 user can install to use Amazon’s voice assistant instead of Microsoft’s.
