Alexa and Cortana join forces to take on Google Assistant and Siri

Cortana, on the other hand, will be able to access Alexa’s smart home and Amazon shopping features. For example, someone might use Cortana in the office, but Alexa at home. Both Amazon and Microsoft are more than capable of expanding the powers of their digital assistants without any help.

While Microsoft and Amazon have formed a closer partnership, Bezos also welcomes Apple and Google to offer similar integration, and says he’d support it. Nadella also appears to welcome the idea, saying “Hopefully, they’ll be inspired by it” in an NYT interview. Jeff Bezos stated there were going to be a number of successful intelligence agents with access to a number of data sets that have different specialized skill regions. This means that while you are on your computer, you can ask Cortana to lock your Alexa-connected doors, or turn on the lights, and it should making controlling your smartphone easier, wherever you are.

Long-term, the goal is a deep integration in which each assistant simply knows to use the other for a specific task, Bezos told the New York Times’ Nick Wingfield. “Hopefully, they’ll be inspired by it”, added Nadella. Amazon and Microsoft announced this surprise collaboration this morning.

Amazon has been busy turning Alexa into an engine for e-commerce while Microsoft has, as expected, integrated Cortana into Windows and Outlook from a productivity point of view.

When Amazon Echo’s Alexa can’t find the answer to a question in a search query it turns to Bing as a backup, so it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary that two virtual assistants – Cortana and Alexa – can now converse.

Even so, it still seems unusual that these two will partner up.

Apple vice president Phil Schiller said the Siri team at Apple had tuned the assistant into a “musicologist” that learns the tastes of listeners and gets songs from the internet cloud.

Neither company is now working with Apple and Google, who offer the Siri and Assistant intelligent assistants respectively, according to the report.

The AI race is now becoming more competitive with Apple already expected to release its own Siri-powered speaker, the HomePod, later this December.

Not to be left behind, Alphabet Inc GOOGL.O said on Wednesday Google Assistant will soon be available on third-party speakers and other home appliances.

Amazon is up 27.59% this year.