It’s official: Microsoft has taken the step to scrap Cortana in Windows 11, as promised a while ago.
If you recall, Microsoft informed us back in June that Cortana would be killed later in 2023. We then heard a firm date for that, which was August, and the first sightings of some people seeing Cortana dumped were reported just over a week ago.
And now it seems that Microsoft is completely withdrawing support for the digital assistant.
notifies that the deprecation of Cortana is in progress and you will receive a notification that the assistant is no longer available if you try to open it in Windows 11. Along with that notification, a link to a support page is provided where you can find more information about what’s going on here.
The change appears to be rolling out to everyone on Windows 11 now, though some people may still be able to access Cortana, but not for much longer.
Cortana will also be getting the elbow from Microsoft Teams later this year, we’re told, and won’t stay in Outlook mobile until the end of 2023.
Analysis: Curtains on Cortana across the board
Saying goodbye to Cortana won’t be a difficult task for most users. After all, especially for the general computer population using Windows 11, Cortana wasn’t widely used anyway. As a result, Microsoft had already focused the digital assistant more on business use, but Cortana will soon also be dumped from Microsoft Teams.
The reason to get rid of Cortana pretty much everywhere (except Outlook Mobile, for some reason) is obvious, and that’s the incoming Windows Copilot AI, a much more ambitious desktop assistant.
This will basically be the Bing AI integrated into a side panel in Windows 11, but with lots of additional capabilities to tweak Windows settings in different ways so you don’t have to hunt for these (options that might be deep in submenus somewhere ).
Microsoft’s Copilot is already in trial versions of Windows 11
, but right now it’s still a barebones incarnation of what the software giant promised. This means it’s really just a built-in Bing chatbot with some very limited powers to manipulate the Windows 11 environment, though Microsoft will be building out the latter facets significantly in the future.
Rumor has it that Copilot could debut in Windows 11 23H2, and in that light it would make sense to clean up Cortana before then. However, we still have our doubts whether Copilot will be impressive enough to launch in a few months (mind you, the fact that Bing AI itself wasn’t ready yet didn’t stop Microsoft from launching the chatbot either).