Video: Google's Assistant gets an AI upgrade with Duplex
There's a subtle, but key difference between "assistant" and "assistance" (beyond the letters at the end of each word). Microsoft is looking to highlight that distinction with Cortana, its personal digital assistant that rivals Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri.
Starting with Microsoft's Build 2018 developer conference this week, "we are starting to tell a different story" about Cortana, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Cortana Javier Soltero told me during a meeting at the Washington State Convention Center this week.
Not long ago, Microsoft execs might have opted to rattle off a new set of features and/or OEM partners, a list of coming skills and an associated roadmap for Cortana at a show like Build. This week, Microsoft opted instead to show, not tell, what it it's planning for Cortana, Soltero said.
"We were all over the Day 1 keynote," Soltero said, "but the difference was that Cortana was embedded in a number of products and assistive in a useful and important way."
Cortana was front and center in a concept demo of how meetings could be made more intelligent [1]on Day 1 of Build. Cortana helped facilitate a meeting, providing participant identification, automatic transcription and translation and more.
Microsoft and Amazon also provided on stage at day one of Build a first public demo of the Cortana-Alexa integration[2] the two announced last summer. By saying "Alexa, open Cortana," users some time later this year will be able to use Cortana from an Alexa-powered device, and conversely, to summon Alexa from Windows 10 PCs via Cortana.
Microsoft is aiming to get users to think of Cortana not as a separate app or