So long, Cortana. Microsoft is retiring the voice assistant’s Windows app this month.
The company is now rolling out an update for some Windows users that effectively disables the Cortana app. The update causes the software to only show a page that says the voice assistant has been “deprecated,” meaning it’s no longer in development and could be retired.
In an updated support page, Microsoft adds: “Starting in August 2023, we will no longer support Cortana in Windows as a standalone app.”
The company initially announced it was ending Cortana support for Windows in June. But at the time, Microsoft merely pegged the date to “late 2023.” So it looks like Redmond decided to sunset the software a little sooner than expected.
It's unlikely many people will mourn Cortana's demise, though. Microsoft originally launched Cortana in 2014 to compete with Apple’s Siri. But after a few years, Microsoft began pulling back investment in Cortana as voice assistant software fell out of vogue.
Since then, the tech industry has seen a resurgence in chatbots, thanks to the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Microsoft is already incorporating the technology through the OpenAI-powered Bing Chat and Windows Copilot, a more advanced AI assistant that the company has started to beta-test for Windows users. Both products, along with Voice access in Windows 11, are also intended to replace Cortana.
That said, the company’s support document notes Cortana will “continue to be available in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams rooms.” It also looks like Microsoft is disabling the Cortana app first for users on Windows preview builds, rather than the stable release. So mainstream users can still use it for a little longer.