Earlier this year, Cyanogen and Microsoft announced that they’d be working together to integrate Microsoft services into Cyanogen OS, including Skype, OneDrive, and Office. It was also said that Microsoft would “create native integrations” into Cyanogen OS. Now we’ve got an idea of what that might’ve be hinting at.
In an interview with International Business Times, Cyanogen CEO Kirt McMaster has revealed that his company is working with Microsoft to “deeply integrate” Cortana — the Windows Phone digital assistant — into the upcoming version of Cyanogen OS. McMaster wouldn’t give up any other details about the project, but he offered up an example of how it would be better than Siri, Apple’s digital assistant:
“When Apple launched Apple Music at WWDC, they showed the Siri integration with Apple Music. Siri doesn’t power Spotify like that so we can do these kind of things with for example, integration of Microsoft’s Cortana into the OS enabling natural language to power Spotify and other services.”
Microsoft recently released a Cortana app for Android that’ll let users get some of the same functionality that Windows Phone users have. If Cyanogen works with Microsoft to deeply integrate Cortana into Cyanogen OS, though, folks that use Cyanogen OS could get an even better version of Cortana. And for Microsoft, integrating Cortana into Cyanogen OS could help make Cortana better for all of its users
