What Happens When Two Intelligent Assistants Come Together?

In a few days, it will be no surprise if you command, “Hey Cortana, open Alexa” or instruct Alexa to open Cortana. The digital world is witnessing an unexpected alliance of two leaders- Amazon and Microsoft. Both are integrating their intelligent assistants. Soon, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana will start communicating with each other. This is a first-of-its-kind collaboration that is going to advance the AI innovations to the next level.

Here is how this cross-platform integration will empower the users of both:

• Firstly, the users of one AI will benefit from other’s skills. In future, it will be easy for you summon Cortana through Alexa or vice versa.
• Cortana is deeply integrated with the Office suite. So, Amazon users will easily get access to all the knowledge and productivity features provided by Office.
• Microsoft’s AI will open the gates to more than 20,000 skills of Alexa. With this, you can easily do your shopping on Amazon.com, manage your calendars, or chat from one platform to another.
• More value and choice for the customers as well as developers.
• Alexa as a guest on Cortana: This feature makes your life easier by offering you a great shopping experience. For example, if you are at your workstation and you are getting an alert on low stock of groceries, you can immediately ask Cortana to open Alexa and order goods. You can also make the payment via your preferred payment method through your Amazon account.
• Cortana as a guest on Alexa: Alexa users will have access to the productivity applications of Cortana, like setting reminders, managing your appointments, getting alerts on upcoming events etc. in short, Cortana makes you stay organized.
• Initially, this integration will be available in Windows 10 PCs, followed by iOS and Android apps in the future.

There are multiple Intelligent Assistants in the world like Apple’s Siri and Google’s digital assistant, each having access to different sets of data and specializing in separate areas. This kind of cross-platform integration will bring together their strengths that will complement one another, and offer an outstanding and rich experience to users. Alexa on Cortana enabled devices and Cortana on Alexa enabled devices will hit the market by end of this year.

Suggested read: Microsoft’s take in Artificial Intelligence.