It’s very tough on the market of virtual assistants: another competitor recently joined the rivalry of Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Alexa, and it is Bixby by Samsung. And when the competition gets tough, wait for alliances. Recently it was Alexa and Cortana who joined their forces to increase mutual performance. Now Alexa can get answers from Microsoft’s service and vice versa.
At first glance, such partnership may appear somewhat unexpected. However, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, thinks that there is nothing odd. He gives an analogy as you may ask one friend for a camping advice, but ask another for a restaurant recommendation. As for a specific advantage that Bezos mentions an ability to use information from Outlook because only Cortana is deeply integrated with Microsoft services. From now on, Alexa will be able to answer any questions regarding appointments stored in Outlook.
However, the alliance will be quite awkward in the beginning. If, for example, you need to request some information from Cortana through Alexa, you need to say “Alexa, open Cortana” first, and the same applies to Cortana. The discussion about the partnership began in 2016. It is believed that Bezos was the author of this idea. As he added, we have not made similar proposals to other developers of virtual assistants like Google and Apple.