Microsoft bringing Cortana to iOS and Android via Companion App

Microsoft announced today that it will be bring Cortana to iOS and Android via the Companion app. The app, which will allow Windows 10 users to interact with their PC from any device they want will come to both major platforms and will include the Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant.

Announced in a blog post, head of Microsoft OS group Joe Belfiore said that the new companion app will allow users of both iPhones and Android smartphones to have the option of a companion to Cortana on Windows 10 PCs. The companion app will allow users to access things like Microsoft OneDrive contents, documents etc.

The reason behind this move by Microsoft is to make its apps and services available to a wide array of users which use devices other than Microsoft Windows Phone. Even though Google Now and Apple Siri have been kept respectively private and in their own domain, Microsoft is taking a different approach by making its Cortana voice assistant available to rival devices.

Installing companion app and having the Cortana voice assistant doesn’t mean that a user cannot use the default voice assistant. It is entirely up to users and they can use Apple’s Siri with it like before and Android users can use Google Now just the way they do even after having the Microsoft’s voice assistant.

One thing that sets Cortana apart from Google Now and Siri is that Cortana voice assistant has notifications features which it can use to alert users about meetings, alarms, emails, messages, reminders and other stuff like that and will also notify them on all other connected devices.

The Phone Companion app for Windows 10 PC will allow users to connect their phone to the Windows PC in order to sync content like documents, music, photos etc without doing any extra work of connecting and copy pasting content from phone’s memory to PCs hard drive.