Microsoft has announced its starting to roll out Cortana integration in Skype. The company originally announced the feature last year during their whole bots era when it thought building AI-powered robots into everything was the future. While this idea never really took, at least we’re now seeing a version of that goal brought to life by Cortana.
With Cortana in Skype, users will receive suggested replies based on the context of text message threads with your friends similar to Apple’s QuickType keyboard and Android’s Smart Replies. Cortana can even suggest things like movie reviews and restaurants if it finds you and your buddy are thinking about heading out for the night. Cortana can also make calendar appointments based on information in the chat thread alongside remind you to do things. You can even have a conversation with Cortana itself in a dedicated chat thread like you can with the Google Assistant in Allo. It can answer your questions, get the weather, check the stocks, suggest restaurants and films, and more.
This comes after Microsoft gave Skype a modern redesign to make it feel more like a messaging service than a business-focused communication tool. Adding artificial intelligence to it puts it more at the consumer level and it’ll be interesting to see how it affects the service and users’ day-to-day operations from this day forward.
Right now, iOS and Android users in the United States can get Cortana integration within Skype simply by updating their apps. Those in other parts of the world will have to wait until some time in the future to gain the functionality. Fortunately, you likely don’t have a very long wait ahead of you until then.
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