It has now been over two years since Microsoft pulled the plug on its own virtual assistant Cortana. Though it looks like in some ways, the AI lady from Halo had made a comeback, via the company’s new AI obsession, Bing. While the new generative AI tech could take voice prompts on mobile almost right out of the gate, the feature is finally coming to PCs.
As per the announcement blog post, Microsoft says that you can click on the microphone icon in the Bing Chat box, and then enunciate your prompts. For now, the company says that the generative AI chatbot supports English, Japanese, French, German and Mandarin, but noted that there are “more languages on the way”. If you want to, you can also have the AI read out the answers, as the company says that it also supports text-to-speech answers.
While Microsoft announced that it was ending support for Cortana back in 2021, you could still make use of the virtual assistant on Windows, if that’s something you use frequently. With the new features of Bing in its generative AI iteration, it looks like the old virtual assistant looks will be completely phased out, at least on Windows specifically. In a support page, the company says that the virtual assistant will still be available on Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams rooms.
This means that, on one hand, you’ll lose the ability to get your Windows PC to do some simple tasks for you, like setting timers and creating reminders. But on the flip side, you’ll gain the more generally useful Bing and the more work-oriented Copilot instead. One can argue that these will generally see more use (as well as more monetisable), while doing completely different things compared to the outgoing Cortana.
(Source: Microsoft [1], [2])
