Does it not feel like the voice assistant space is getting way crowded? You got Cortana, Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby among others. Not forgetting you are supposed to buy hardware devices for each of these voice assistants. Take, for instance, if you got Amazon Echo and at one point want to use the Google Assistant service, you will have to buy the Google Home device. That all seems like such a hustle if you ask me!
However, you will be glad to know that at least two of these voice assistants have decided to work together. Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa are said to start complementing one another instead of being competitors.
Now you can schedule a meeting, access your calendars, and set reminders from either of the voice assistants and it will reflect on all of them. From your computer, you can ask Cortana to make a purchase for you on Amazon; a task that you can only perform on the Amazon Echo.
A Microsoft spokesperson told CNN Tech that the idea of collaboration between Cortana and Alexa was incepted during a meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos back in May 2016 during the Microsoft CEO Summit.
Experts argue that more consumers would be willing to purchase smart home products and use their corresponding voice assistants if they were able to work across platforms. Currently, the biggest challenge smart home devices face is that their products are siloed. Take, for instance, some devices can only be used on Apple HomeKit, and if the same user wants to use Amazon Echo, they will have to switch back to Siri to do certain tasks like dimming the lights.