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Microsoft wants Cortana in the home, Amazon Echo competitor coming

It looks like Microsoft wants to get into the smart home business and it will be using Cortana to make it happen. Cortana has been Microsoft's digital assistant for mobile and Windows for quite some time and now, Cortana will be hitting smart home devices, like Harman/Kardon's new Amazon Echo competitor in 2017, alongside other bits of upcoming hardware. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bikRuaJAv5g']

Harman/Kardon is Microsoft's first third-party partner working to bring Cortana to smart home devices. The first product will be a cylindrical speaker powered by Cortana, capable of listening out for commands and helping with certain tasks, similarly to Alexa and the Amazon Echo. Specifically, Cortana devices will have “real-time, two-way audio communications with Skype, e-mail, calendar and list integration”.

cortanadevices

Microsoft first began talking about bringing Cortana to more devices at the WinHEC conference earlier this week. The company used Internet of Things devices like fridges, toasters or thermostats as examples of things that could benefit from Cortana integration. However, those devices may be coming later down the line.

Aside from that, there is the possibility that Microsoft may release its own stand-alone Cortana powered device at some point, though we have no idea what this might be. The Cortana Devices SDK is now available to OEMs in preview form, so we can expect to see more in 2017.

KitGuru Says: There was a lot of buzz around Cortana back when it was first announced for Windows Phone but smart home devices are quite different. What do you guys think of smart devices like the Amazon Echo and this new Harman/Kardon speaker? Do you think AI interaction will become a normal part of daily life over the next few years?

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5 comments

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  3. What the actual fuck is the point of smart fridges and toasters?

  4. To bring about Skynet’s inevitable take-over of the world of course.

    On a sort of serious not, I guess some people when they are out want to check what’s left in the fridge and drop by a supermarket based on that. Or maybe even have it order your groceries automatically.

  5. As someone who has been studying social interaction for a while now and has published a few papers I can give a very simple answer to the question: no AI interaction wil not become a normal part. At least not more advanced than what you have with systems like Siri nowadays. Human-human interaction is not based on a limited set of deterministic rules that work in some clearly logical or structural way. While language has some structure, its use varies based on culture from the most macro to the most micro level. We rely on a vast amount of unspoken assumptions and we have no idea how we acquire this, nor how we could program an AI to start learning them.

    For now, we will have to make due with AIs that try to get the gist of what we want based on a simple command.