Once upon a time, voice assistants became one of the must-have features on smart devices such as cell phones and computers, and between one time and another, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's Assistant, Samsung's Bixby, Xiaomi's Xiao Ai, and Huawei's Ceila came out in an endless stream.

Nowadays, under the impact of generative AI such as ChatGPT and Copilot, these voice assistants are destined to be drowned in the river of history if they fail to catch up with the trend of the times, and Microsoft's Cortana is a living example.

According to the foreign media Windows Last report, Microsoft accelerated the elimination of Cortana program, its latest announcement in Windows 11 canceled the independent Cortana application, and eliminated it is Microsoft now in the main recommended Windows Copilot.

This has led people to define Cortana as the first personal voice assistant to be phased out by AI.

Cortana Discontinued on Windows 11 Cortana is a personal assistant product that was first unveiled by Microsoft in April 2014 at the Build developer conference. In the same year, Microsoft released the name "Xiaona" as the Chinese name for Cortana in mainland China.

Once released, it attracted a lot of attention. The so-called "world's first cross-platform intelligent personal assistant," Cortana, can set reminders, recognize speech without keyboard input, and answer questions and perform simple tasks.

Also, somewhat similar to Siri on iOS and Google Now on Android, Cortana wasn't originally built for desktops and laptops, but rather for Microsoft's ill-fated Windows Phone 8.1 operating system.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Cortana takes its moniker from the name of the AI that accompanies the main character, the Master Chief Petty Officer, in the Halo series of games.

However, despite its reputation, Cortana hasn't captured the hearts and minds of many users, forcing Microsoft to take a fresh look at Cortana.

In 2019, Cortana was decoupled from Windows Search (meaning you had to invoke Cortana specifically to use it), and that summer it was pulled from the Xbox platform. In February 2020, Microsoft announced that various consumer "skills" including music and home controls would be removed from Cortana as it was repositioned as a "personal productivity assistant in Microsoft 365." In subsequent releases of Windows 10, Cortana was completely separated from Windows Search and ran as a separate app. In March 2021, Harmon Kardon removed Cortana from its Invoke speakers via a firmware update, not only from new speakers but also from existing ones. That same year, Microsoft announced that its Cortana app for iOS and Android would be officially discontinued on March 31, 2021. Then, in June of this year, Microsoft focused its attention on Cortana on Windows, trying to "kill" it.

At that time, Microsoft announced:

"We're making some changes to Windows that will affect users of the Cortana app. Starting at the end of 2023, we will no longer support Cortana in Windows as a standalone app ......".

It's only August, and Microsoft is getting "impatient". With the new Microsoft Store update that Microsoft is rolling out to some Windows 11 users, the standalone Personal Assistant app has been shut down.

This means that if you currently have the app installed on your Windows 11 system, it's time to uninstall it because when you open it, you'll be greeted with a pop-up message saying that Cortana has been deprecated.