Last week a particular patent submitted by Apple outlined its plan to bring the mobile virtual assistant Siri to the desktop. It looks like Microsoft might be planning the same thing by brining the Windows 8.1 voice assistant Cortana into Windows 9 proper. Cortana has actually been running within Threshold—Microsoft’s codenamed OS build widely belived to be Windows 9—for some time, according to Neowin, but now the integration looks like it’s moving forward. Neowin describes Cortana’s “graduation” from a testing stage to a “let us push this forward and see if we can ship it” stage.
Rumors have been circulating for a while that Microsoft is planning to incorporate its personal digital assistant, Cortana, into the next major version of Windows. On August 11, those rumors turned up a notch, with Neowin.net reporting that internal “dogfood” builds of “Threshold,” aka Windows 9, include Cortana integration. Windows Threshold is expected to arrive in the spring of 2015. A public preview of Threshold may be available this fall, according to my sources. As is the case with Cortana on Windows Phone 8.1, Cortana will be an app, not part of the operating system itself, Neowin’s Brad Sams said. Cortana takes its codename from Cortana, an artifically intelligent character in Microsoft’s Halo series who can learn and adapt. Cortana relies on machine-learning technology and the “Satori” knowledge repository powering Bing to learn what users want to find, track and do. Cortana is Microsoft’s alternative to Google Now and Apple’s Siri. Microsoft is in the midst of broadening Cortana availability through a variety of alpha and beta programs worldwide. Cortana is core to Microsoft’s makeover of the entire “shell” — the core services and experience — of the future versions of Windows Phone, Windows and the Xbox operating systems. Making Cortana available across all three platforms fits in with Microsoft’s ‘One Windows’ strategy.