Reuters is reporting that according to "people familiar with the project," Microsoft will be bringing its Cortana digital assistant—currently found only on Windows Phone and coming soon to Windows 10 and Xbox—to Android and iOS.
The report reaffirms non-specific comments made by Julie Larson-Green, Microsoft's "Chief Experience Officer," last November. When asked if Cortana would be made available on other operating systems, she said, "yeah."
Before that happens, the report says that Microsoft will be upgrading Cortana to integrate work from an artificial intelligence project that the company named "Einstein." Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research's Redmond site, told Reuters that the Einstein name was chosen because of Albert Einstein's work on time and space; Cortana will have more knowledge of where users are and what they're likely to be doing at any given time.
The result is that Cortana should have greater predictive powers. The agent can already do things such as tell you when to leave for the airport in order to make your flight after learning about the flight from e-mailed confirmations, but currently its inferences and anticipatory capabilities feel weaker than those of Google Now.
Google's service has none of the personality of Cortana or Apple's Siri, but it's much better at figuring out what users are interested in and what they care about based on data such as their search histories. Much of Google Now's value comes from what it tells you without having to be explicitly asked. This is in contrast to Siri's largely reactive nature, with Apple's agent springing into action only in response to queries.
Cortana offers a mix of both approaches, but while the interactive and reactive elements do have value, it's the proactive stuff—telling the user important or useful things without needing to be asked first—that truly makes the agent seem intelligent.
Cortana is due to be updated to include work from the Einstein project in the "fall time frame," said Horvitz. The apps for iOS and Android will come some time after this.
Putting Cortana on other platforms would be a move consistent with other recent Microsoft behavior. Microsoft's touch-friendly version of Office for phones and tablets, for example, made its debut on iOS, not Windows. Under CEO Satya Nadella, the goal has been to sell Microsoft's software and services rather than to sell Windows.
But the long-term value of such a move is harder to divine. While having more users will give Cortana more data and in principle result in more intelligent services, making Cortana cross-platform removes one more reason to buy into, or even care about, the Windows ecosystem. With Office on other platforms, there is at least the justification that it will stimulate sales of Office 365 and hence bring in some money.
Cortana doesn't have the same sales potential; while it can be used to perform plain Web queries, and these do include ads, this isn't really the point of the service. Existing Bing apps for other platforms can already do dumb Web searches, as can Siri. Is a Cortana app really going to inspire iOS and Android users to pay for Microsoft's software and services? That's hard to imagine. On the other hand, a good Cortana app for the iPhone would represent just one more reason not to buy a Windows Phone phone. That's good for Apple; it's much less so for Microsoft.
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