Microsoft Kills its Cortana App on Windows 11

Microsoft has killed its standalone Cortana app on Windows 11. If you have the app installed on your PC, Microsoft has just released a new update that will make it display a message explaining that it’s now been deprecated (via Windows Latest).

Back in June, Microsoft warned that it would stop supporting Cortana as a standalone app in Windows 11 and Windows 10 in “late 2023,” but we’re already there. If the Cortana app no longer works on Windows 11, Cortana remains available as a “productivity assistant” in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams displays, and Microsoft Teams rooms.

Cortana first launched on Windows Phone 8.1 back in 2014, and Microsoft brought it to Windows 10 PCs a year later. Unfortunately, the voice assistant never enjoyed the same momentum as Alexa or the Google Assistant, and except for the Harman Kardon Invoke, there was no interest from third-party manufacturers to include Cortana in their products.

In recent years, Microsoft tried to focus on productivity use cases for Cortana, but the writing was already on the wall. Despite the end of support for Cortana on Windows, Panos Panay, Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer said at CES earlier this year that AI was “going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows.” This bold claim is already starting to materialize with Microsoft’s various “Copilot” products built with OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released a solid alternative to ChatGPT with its new Bing chatbot, which is also integrated into the company’s Edge browser. Later this year, Windows 11 version 23H2 should also introduce Windows Copilot, a new AI assistant that should be much more useful than Cortana ever was. Even though you won’t be able to talk to the Windows Copilot as you can with voice-based assistants, Cortana too often fell back to search results when it didn’t understand what users were looking for.

Windows Copilot is currently available in preview with Insiders on the Dev Channel, and Microsoft just started to roll it out to a subset of Beta Channel testers yesterday. It’s currently a web-based experience that relies on Microsoft Edge, but there’s still room for improvement with the upcoming support for third-party plugins. With Microsoft working with OpenAI on an open standard for plugins, Microsoft should avoid another Cortana situation where all developers are only building skills for the competing AI assistants from Amazon and Google.