TeCHnology

Microsoft has killed its standalone Cortana app on Windows 11. If you have the app installed on your PC, Microsoft has just released a new update that will make it display a message explaining that it’s now been deprecated (via Windows Latest).

Back in June, Microsoft warned that it would stop supporting Cortana as a standalone app in Windows 11 and Windows 10 in “late 2023,” but we’re already there. If the Cortana app no longer works on Windows 11, Cortana remains available as a “productivity assistant” in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams displays, and Microsoft Teams rooms.

Cortana first launched on Windows Phone 8.1 back in 2014, and Microsoft brought it to Windows 10 PCs a year later. Unfortunately, the voice assistant never enjoyed the same momentum as Alexa or the Google Assistant, and except for the Harman Kardon Invoke, there was no interest from third-party manufacturers to include Cortana in their products.

In recent years, Microsoft tried to focus on productivity use cases for Cortana, but the writing was already on the wall. Despite the end of support for Cortana on Windows, Panos Panay, Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer said at CES earlier this year that AI was “going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows.” This bold claim is already starting to materialize with Microsoft’s various “Copilot” products built with OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology.