What happened to Microsoft Cortana?

(Before I start, I just want you to know that I put a lot of effort into looking for information, I love doing this, but I spend a lot of time researching, searching for information and writing, I don't use AI like others, I write everything from my heart, so please, I would appreciate your Kudos, please share this blog with other people who like computer science and write a nice comment,  That would help me a lot. Thank you)

Hello, welcome to a new blog post, today I'm going to talk about something that no one really talks about, and that no one has even noticed, I'm talking about Cortana, do you remember Cortana? Have you ever used it? Well, here I'll talk in detail about Cortana, features, reasons for deletion, and so on.

What was Cortana?

To begin with, Cortana was a virtual assistant controlled by text and voice, originally included in Windows 8.1 Phone, Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10, launched on April 2, 2014, she basically helped you with everything, you could say "Hey Cortana" to activate it, she could set reminders, tell her the weather, send an email, open an app,  search Bing, tell you a joke, etc. Basically kind of like an AI, but that's another topic for another blog. Cortana was born thanks to the fact that at that time (2014 - 2017 approximately) virtual assistants were very fashionable for some reason, and Microsoft did not sit still, it got down to work and created Cortana. There's something wrong here, and that's that unfortunately I never got to try Cortana myself, but according to internet reviews it was good but it had a lot of bugs...

Errors in the application

Like I said, according to some people, Cortana sometimes didn't respond, said that the service wasn't available, didn't understand well when using the microphone, and many other things, it seems that Cortana wasn't that well polished, and in fact, a lot of people didn't use her because of this, she had a lot of bugs and they didn't think she was a good assistant,  Cortana had a future, but so much so that Microsoft didn't think so.

"Cortana isn't available in your region"

Here something that is also wrong, and that is that many people wanted to try Cortana, but they got the famous message "Cortana isn't available in your region" well it seems that Cortana in many parts of the world was not available, Latin America seems not, (Although I think that in Mexico it was available, I really don't know) and there were solutions,  in fact if you search on YouTube you can find several tutorials on how to fix this "error", and they really worked, I just saw one and according to what it says, you had to change the region of your PC to a fake region, a region where Cortana was available, for example, in the case of Latin America you could change the region of your PC to Spain,  it's really simple, but the problem is that natively, Cortana wasn't available in many parts of the planet, so having to do these extra steps didn't appeal to a lot of people, and that would be one of the reasons for its removal as well.

Discontinuation

The last stable version of Cortana was 365.0.0.0 on February 28, 2020, and was fully discontinued in 2023. Doing some research, I found a supposed comment from Microsoft, which said that Cortana was no match for other features of the moment such as Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, etc. And Microsoft was gradually removing Cortana from Windows 10, for example, we know that in Windows 10 you can have a search bar on the taskbar, very nice, because it turns out that if you had Cortana enabled on your PC then Cortana was "combined" with the search bar on the taskbar,  showing a microphone icon and directly from there you could talk to her, but for example that feature was removed in an update, showing that they were going to remove Cortana entirely. That and much more showed how Microsoft had been slowly removing Cortana and its features from Windows 10. But something curious is that today the Cortana application in Windows 10 and 11 is still present, although of course, it does not work, and rather redirects you to a Microsoft page where it explains everything, and also with a phrase that says "Cortana in Windows as a standalone application is deprecated"

Alternatives

Nowadays you could consider Copilot as an alternative to Cortana, Copilot at first was just an AI and that's it, but it seems that Microsoft wants to make Copilot an intelligent and AI-powered virtual assistant, a great idea. In addition, there are also other interesting alternatives that you can find on the internet, I remember that there was a virtual assistant called Mia, I don't know if she is still alive, receives updates or what, but well, there is nothing you can do.

My Opinion

I know no one cares about my opinion, but in my opinion, Microsoft was able to give a big update to Cortana, with more languages, for more regions, bug fixes, even a new design and much more, but of course, that never happened and never will happen, also if you think about it, if Microsoft had done this,  It would have been the same as if Microsoft had released an Internet Explorer 12, NO ONE WOULD USE IT, sadly it's the truth, Cortana had to die, and it's a shame that I couldn't get to try her, I was too late... Oh, God.