Amazon, Microsoft talk business with digital assistant love-in

Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana are hooking up in boost for voice commerce market

Amazon and Microsoft have announced that digital assistants Alexa and Cortana will be able to talk to each other as the industry heavyweights form a hefty voice commerce alliance.

Alexa customers will be able to access Cortana's features such as booking a meeting or accessing work calendars, while Cortana customers can ask Alexa to control their smarthome devices, shop on Amazon and interact with third-party developers.

Users will be able to turn to an Amazon Echo device and say, "Alexa, open Cortana," or open a Microsoft Windows 10 device and say, "Cortana, open Alexa." The interaction will kick in later this year, according to the firms.

"Ensuring Cortana is available for our customers everywhere and across any device is a key priority for us," said Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. "Bringing Cortana's knowledge, Office 365 integration, commitments, and reminders to Alexa is a great step towards that goal."

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, said: "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 specialised skill areas.

"Together, their strengths will complement each other and provide customers with a richer and even more helpful experience. It's great for Echo owners to get easy access to Cortana."

Stephanie Trunzo, chief digital officer and COO at PointSource, claimed that the partnership is a promising step towards demonstrating the power of cognitive intelligence in voice interface.

"Voice and zero UI interactions are currently limited by the capabilities programmed into each model. Alexa enables a set of defined skills for specific use cases and Cortana is designed to be a voice interaction interface for findability and retrievability," she said.

"Combining capabilities allows additive use case patterns. When the systems connect multi-variable flows, and enable learning and iteration, only then will we see the real power of cognitive intelligence in voice interface."

Erin Jordan, co-author of the Walker Sands Future of Retail 2017 study, said that as "Cortana and Alexa become better friends", it speaks volumes to the rise of voice commerce and the importance of providing a more seamless customer experience for shoppers given the state of the market.