Microsoft is officially killing Cortana on its Windows 11 devices by passing an update to remove the virtual assistant from the OS.
Although Redmond says that Cortana will still be available in apps like Outlook and Teams, it shouldn’t be for too long, there too. It’s known that Microsoft is investing heavily in Bing Chat, powered by OpenAI’s GPT LLM, which may replace Cortana for virtual assistant jobs.
Dumping Cortana on Windows OS
We all know this day would come. As noted by Windows Latest, Microsoft, in its latest update to Windows 11, removed Cortana from the build, finally. This move has long been anticipated, as the company has ignored its virtual assistant for years, only to be dumped one day.
Microsoft hasn’t passed any feature updates to Cortana for the last two years, and the one passed recently was to kill it altogether! After installing the available update to Cortana, the app says, “Cortana in Windows as a standalone app is deprecated.”
Well, the virtual assistant will be integrated into other Microsoft apps like Outlook and Teams. But we expect this integration to be removed, too, soon. It’s all because of the new Bing Chat and Windows Copilot, powered by generative AI, and Microsoft has been pushing them a lot lately.
Windows Latest also noted that Cortana would be shut down on previous versions of Windows in the coming weeks or replaced by Bing Chat completely. Taking more juice out of OpenAI’s partnership, Microsoft may refine the Bing Chat more seriously than developing another Cortana.
This leaves Apple’s Siri as the only reliable virtual assistant today, as Google, Samsung and Amazon have long ignored their offerings. But as Apple said, it’s been working on a “wide range of AI technologies,” including “generative AI”, for years; we may hope for Siri to be revamped and relevant one day.
