Dissection: A Closer Look At Cortana Usage, Growth And Competitors

This week, Microsoft announced an expansion of the functionality of Cortana with the Cortana Skills Kit and Cortana Devices SDK that will dramatically expand the places we will find the AI assistant. In the press release, the company also stated that there are more than 145 million monthly active users of Cortana and on the surface, this seems impressive, but digging in a bit reveals there is more to the story.

For starters, we can get a small glimpse of the growth the platform is experiencing as Microsoft said in July of 2016 that there were 100 million monthly active users (MAU) of Cortana. Doing simple math, we can see that Cortana has added 45 million MAUs in about six months. Notably, during this period, the Anniversary update was released to consumers but it’s not immediately clear if this release encouraged more users to try out Cortana or it’s simply coincidental of the growth and release of a major update to Windows 10.

Digging in a bit further, at WinHEC last week, Microsoft stated that there were 140 million MAUs interacting with the Cortana search box. Doing more simple math with the 145 MAUs announced yesterday, it would appear that there are only approximately 5 million MAU on mobile devices. Granted, I’ll be the first to say that this isn’t a perfect calculation but based on the information publicly stated by Microsoft, this appears to be accurate. Considering that there are over a billion iOS devices active each month and more than 1.4 billion active Android devices, Cortana only has market share on the desktop and has failed to penetrate that of the much larger smartphone market.

Microsoft’s figures, while they are large numbers, do not appear to be the roses the numbers make them seem to be. For starters, the 140 million MAU figure  includes people who have turned on Cortana, hit the Windows key and typed a query. Technically, this makes them fall into the user-base of Cortana but is that a high-quality engagement? I’d argue it’s not an engagement at all as this is a basic search that conveniently uses Cortana. A better metric would be how many people are using their voice to ask a question or even typing in a question (not hitting windows key and then typing Outlook) but don’t hold your breath waiting for Microsoft to release this type of information.

To show a bit of perspective about the size Cortana’s footprint using Microsoft’s MAUs, we do have a figure from Apple that shows the usage of Siri. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in October of this year, Tim Cook stated that Siri receives 2 billion requests per week. What we don’t know is how many MAUs that translates into but to put some context to it, if a user is asking 5 questions a week, that would mean there are 400 million MAUs.

Another way to look at it, Apple has said that there are over 1 billion active iOS devices in January of 2016. An independent report from Parks Associates states that more than half of iPhone owners use Siri; Apple’s figure includes iPads which is not the same as the iPhone so we can’t simply cut the figure in half and arrive at the MAU stat. But, Apple’s figure was released in January, and I would argue that there are more iOS users today (and iPhones) than earlier this year which means 500 million may not be too far off from the real mark; additionally, Siri is now on macOS which will inflate the usage stat.

Further, I’d expect that the engagements with Siri, seeing as it is predominantly on mobile devices, is of much higher quality than what Cortana experiences with Windows 10. The default way to interact with Siri is voice, not text, which is a key difference from how Microsoft’s assistant operates.

At this time, only Apple knows the true MAUs for Siri and hopefully they will release this figure at some point in the near future.

On the other side of the mobile OS fence is Google with Google Now and Google Assistant. Unfortunately, we know very little about the usage of this platform but Google did say earlier this year that voice searches have doubled, year over year, and that’s about all we know.

There is also Amazon who has its Alexa assistant. Considering that the company’s smartphone failed spectacularly, they only real device using the platform is the Echo. But, the Echo line of devices has been a huge hit for the company which is estimated to have sold more than 3 million devices in its lifetime (pdf). Knowing that, Alexa is a very small drop in the AI ocean.

On one hand, I applaud Microsoft for giving us a figure for MAUs of Cortana, although I’d like a further breakdown of how it’s actually used to see if it’s comparable to Siri. At the same time, it also shows us the footprint Cortana has made in the market which isn’t as big as the numbers actually reveal.

I’m cautiously optimistic that the company’s new SDKs will finally give Cortana the momentum it deserves as Microsoft has kept it locked down for far too long. With Harman Kardon building a new device around Cortana, we may be on the cusp of a significant Cortana expansion that dramatically boost the quality engagements with the platform.