Cortana is Rolling Out in Skype for Android and iOS
- Paul Thurrott
- Oct 09, 2017
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17
Microsoft announced today that it has started rolling out Cortana inside of the Skype app for Android and iOS.
“We are bringing Cortana, Microsoft’s intelligent assistant, into Skype to help you in your everyday conversations,” the Skype Team wrote in a new blog post today. “With Cortana, we’ve added a powerful, intelligent assistant to help you with your everyday tasks right where you are and save you time.”
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If this sounds like it’s been a long time coming, well, it has: Microsoft first revealed its plan to bring Cortana to Skype, as a bot, way back in April 2016 at its Build conference.
But the new Cortana integration with Skype goes a bit deeper than that. Yes, you can still manually summon Cortana by starting a new conversation with the bot, or by adding Cortana to an existing Cortana. But now, Cortana will also appear automatically in some cases, when it senses it can be useful.
“Cortana can detect when you’re talking about scheduling events or things you have to do and will recommend setting up a reminder, which you will receive on all your devices that have Cortana enabled,” Microsoft explains. “So, whether you’re talking about weekend plans or an important work appointment, nothing will slip through the cracks.”
It’s not clear yet how deep this integration is, and which actions will trigger the automatic Cortana appearances. But you should be able to find out soon enough: Cortana in Skype is being gradually rolled out, starting today, with Skype users on Android and iOS in the United States first.
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Conversation 17 comments
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Stooks
<p>Exactly what nobody asked for!!!</p><p><br></p><p>Microsoft please do NOT mess up the Xbox One X roll out. I want my Scorpio edition pre-order to live up to its hype.</p><p><br></p><p>I recently moved back to Gmail after giving Outlook dot com yet another try. You can't sync contact pictures, ring tones and SMS tones to the iPhone contact app. Same for Android phones. I do get all kinds of information like "live:361a549f21c45t7" in contacts that use Skype because Skype is connected to my account even though I don't use it and you can't separate the two. In fact sometimes it replaces the contacts name all together. Gmail contacts sync perfectly, pictures and ring tones per contact.</p><p><br></p><p>Microsoft just needs to give up the consumer world save for the Xbox. Or sell it to someone who will take care of it.</p>
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Bats
<p>This is not surprising at all. After all, Google Assistant in running on Google Allo and it's actually quite fun and useful. It's quite obvious, due to Microsoft behavior in recent years, that they are copying Google. I just hope it's as good as Google's Assistant.</p><p><br></p><p>I mentioned weeks ago, how stupid the Skype bots are, when I experienced them playing A Skype game. To repeat what I posted weeks ago, I was playing this Doctor Who game on Skype. On the game "The Doctor" asked me if I wanted to explore a planet. I said No, however the Skype bot took my answer as a Yes. </p><p><br></p><p>Cortana has been out for a while now and it's still so very dumb. What's funny is, is that Satya Nadella keeps lecturing us about the greatness of Microsoft AI, and that's simply not the case now, even with Cortana being around for a few years now. </p>