Alexa and Cortana just got married and Artificial Intelligence was the best man

So much has happened in the voice AI story already, so much is yet to come, but here's a feel good story. Breaking news.

Alexa, Make Cortana our Friend

In the future of voice commands, Alexa will have a red carpet into Microsoft enterprise features. Just recently we heard Google had partnered with Walmart to make Google Express something special, but this, now this is a match made in IoT heaven.

| Alexa, I love you. Cortana, I do. |

Amazon and Microsoft team up

If you can't beat them, join them. AI assistants Alexa and Cortana are beyond the talking stage, and each will be able to access the other in new ways, Microsoft surprise announced on Wednesday, August 30th, 2017. #AlexaCortana

On their honeymoon, users will be able to say things like, "Alexa, open Cortana," or "Cortana, open Alexa," and open a new world of voice controlled bliss. In a far away universe a long time ago, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates were tennis buddies, and who would have known after August was born, Alexa and Cortana would have found each other.

The Race of Artificial Intelligence is Here

Google Assistant and Alexa are having a battle to ubiquity as IoT and voice-activated skills heat up. Skills are to the voice interface, as apps are to mobile.

A.I. voice assistants are hot, and smart speakers are where they make babies.

With Apple, Samsung, Facebook, Xiaomi, Anker, Tencent, Alibaba and others to join the fray in late 2017, it's about to be a Game of Thrones of these things. 2017 is really the year of the voice speaker and personal assistant. This opens up the possibility to an enterprise Dot that could challenge the mini Google Home, that's designed to challenge Dot.

Personal Assistants Are Getting Cozy

What this actually does to Windows 10 and Alexa Skills could actually be quite impressive. Between Alexa getting in sync with Outlook, it gives it access to Cortana's calendar, what it needed to compete with Google Calendar.

The key takeaway from the PR statement:

Alexa customers will be able to access Cortana’s unique features like:

• Booking a meeting or accessing work calendars,
• Reminding you to pick up flowers on your way home
• Reading your work email – all using just your voice. Similarly, Cortana customers can:
• Ask Alexa to control their smart home devices
• Shop on Amazon.com,
• Interact with many of the more than 20,000 skills built by third-party developers, and much more.

Amazon Ate the Cake at their Wedding

Nobody is complaining, when you get to partner with the leader of 70% of the smart speaker market, you are a winner.

What happens in the Cloud, stays in the cloud, but for the consumer, this makes a lot of sense and makes enterprise software much more accessible in the future, and could make LinkedIn itself Alexa compatible.

Bringing Cortana's knowledge, Office 365 integration, commitments, and reminders to Alexa is a great step toward that goal - Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, in a press release Wednesday.

It's a wonderful day for artificial intelligence and a great day for Microsoft and Amazon's history.

The world is big and so multifaceted. There are going to be multiple successful intelligent agents, each with access to different sets of data and with different specialized skill areas. - Jeff Bezoz.

You may now kiss the bride. (Siri was supposed to DJ the event, but she was nowhere to be seen).

In unrelated news, Echo will add support for SMS texting features as well. Alexa, what's my Alexa number?

Sources: | Quora | First reported by the New York Times.

Is this a marrige of skill or one of convenience? Who are the winers and the losers of this?

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