Cortana (virtual assistant)
intelligent personal assistant
Cortana is a discontinued virtual assistant developed by Microsoft and first released in April 2014 that used the Bing search engine to perform tasks such as setting reminders and answering questions for users.
Cortana was available in English, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese language editions, depending on the software platform and region in which it was used.
In 2019, Microsoft began reducing the prevalence of Cortana and converting it from an assistant into different software integrations. It was split from the Windows 10 search bar in April 2019. In January 2020, the Cortana mobile app was removed from certain markets, and on March 31, 2021, the Cortana mobile app was shut down globally. On June 2, 2023, Microsoft announced that support for the Cortana standalone app on Microsoft Windows would end in late 2023 and would be replaced by Microsoft Copilot, an AI chatbot. Support for Cortana in the Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 mobile apps was discontinued in late 2023.
History
Beginnings (2009–2014)
The development of Cortana started in 2009 in the Microsoft Speech products team with general manager Zig Serafin and Chief Scientist Larry Heck. Heck and Serafin established the vision, mission, and long-range plan for Microsoft's digital personal assistant and they built a team with the expertise to create the initial prototypes for Cortana. Some of the key researchers in these early efforts included Microsoft Research researchers Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Andreas Stolcke, and Malcolm Slaney, research software developer Madhu Chinthakunta, and user experience designer Lisa Stifelman.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15897235. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cortana (virtual assistant)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.