Home > News

Microsoft to Drop Cortana Features in Change of Strategy

By Simon Batt
Cortana Productivity Featured

Do you use Microsoft’s Cortana features to manage your computer? You may need to change your habits soon, as Microsoft has just announced that some of Cortana’s skills are going away. This decision is part of a larger strategy to redefine Cortana.

What Will Microsoft Remove from Cortana?

As per Microsoft’s post on the matter, they report:

We’ve tightened access to Cortana so that you must be securely logged in with your work or school account or your Microsoft account before using Cortana, and some consumer skills including music, connected home and third-party skills will no longer be available in the updated Cortana experience in Windows 10.

This means that the majority of Cortana’s entertainment features will soon vanish. If you use Cortana with third-party skills, it’s a good idea to plan around this latest news.

Cortana Productivity Music

Cortana is also being removed from other operating systems. This move is potentially due to competition from Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa. These two smart home assistants have dominated the market, and manufacturers develop hundreds of devices for these two smart helpers. As such, Microsoft may aim to bring Cortana out of the competition.

What Will Microsoft Add to Cortana?

So if Microsoft is stripping Cortana of features and changing their game plan, what’s in the cards? Microsoft wants Cortana to have a productivity focus instead of a consumer one. The update will move Cortana closer to Microsoft 365 and Office 365, Microsoft’s productivity plans. This includes redesigning Cortana to obey Office 365’s terms of service, which means you need to log into a Microsoft account to use Cortana.

Cortana Productivity Office

Cortana will use a chat-like UI that lets you set reminders, find people or files, and get information on meetings. You can still use Cortana to load apps or adjust Windows settings, and she can still crack a joke during downtime; however, Cortana will focus on productivity first and foremost.

At first, only U.S. users will get the update. Over time, however, Microsoft will roll out these changes to its international audience.

When Will Cortana Update?

Microsoft has only revealed that this update will arrive Spring 2020, so it won’t be long until it drops. As such, if you’re a big fan of Cortana, now is a good time to change how you use it so that you won’t be hit so hard when your favorite features are removed.

Changing Cortana’s Core

Microsoft is changing how Cortana works, presumably because the entertainment-aimed smart assistant market has still competition. The new Cortana will instead have a business focus, helping people get work done and remember important dates.

Will this change affect your life? Or do you not use Cortana at all anyway? Let us know below.

Image credit: Windows 10 cortana

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Simon Batt Avatar
Simon Batt
Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.