Digital Assistants are increasingly becoming popular. Whether its Apple’s Siri, Google’ Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Cortana, all are fun and useful to interact with. All the technology companies that have their own digital assistants keep on improving them by adding new features. This makes them cater to more needs of the users. Till now, Microsoft’s Cortana was largely a built-in program in the company’s products. However, now, the software giant is planning to move Cortana as a separate app in the Windows Store.
According to a report in The Verge, a beta version of Cortana has appeared on the Microsoft Store and has naturally led to some speculations. The software giant has plans of using this beta app to update Cortana separately from Windows 10. With this, the company’s digital assistant will supposedly get new features soon. However, another thing that this move indicates is that Cortana will not be a built into Windows 10 operating system.
A number of rumours that suggested that Microsoft is distancing Cortana from Windows 10 started circulating online when the software decoupled the digital assistant from its Search function as a part of the May 2019 update. But then, Cortana was not always built as a web-based service, so it could have also been updated without core Windows 10 changes.
Currently, there is little clarity about what Microsoft has been planning to do. The software giant is expected to connect to the upcoming beta phase of the Windows 10 update that has been codenamed 19H2.
The company had initially planned to begin testing 19H2 by now and had even promised to get the update to testers by spring, according to a report.
Microsoft has also been extremely tight-lipped about what the 19H2 and even includes but it is expected to come later this year. The report also added that the company has also started testing its first 2020 Windows update ahead of 19H2 and it will continue to roll out builds to testers.
In an unrelated piece of news, Microsoft has prohibited its 1,00,000+ employees from using the free version of Slack because of some security concerns. The technology giant also has an entire list of prohibited apps and services. It has even discouraged the use of Amazon web service and Google Docs. The company has also added the popular grammar checking tool Grammarly to its list.
Microsoft has said that all of these have been banned to safeguard its own Intellectual Property.
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