Not with a bang, but a whimper. Microsoft has ended support for its unloved, and mostly forgotten Cortana virtual assistant app on Windows. Cortana in Teams will also be going away later this year. It has been coming — Microsoft killed the iOS and Android versions of the app in 2021. However, the virtual assistant will still exist in Outlook Mobile.
I will not miss the annoying Cortana voice-over that accompanied every initial setup of Windows 10. Cortana was supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and the Google Assistant. But while its rivals found homes in smartphones, and other smart home devices, Cortana always seemed out of place on a desktop operating system or the Xbox game console. The failure of Windows Phone didn’t help. Microsoft even pivoted to working with competitors like Amazon to make Cortana compatible with Alexa when it became clear that Cortana was falling behind.
If you’re on Windows 11, Microsoft is replacing Cortana with Windows Copil…
