Cortana is Coming--Just not this Year

Since a rather shaky launch, Microsoft has been doing something we never imagined they would do: improving the Xbox One. It’s almost as if Microsoft was listening to customer complaints and actually responding to them, which was a silly idea of course, but you can’t shake the feeling they might be interested in making the Xbox One a desirable machine to own.

Sarcasm aside, one of the more enticing additions to the Xbox One’s already robust arsenal is actually a dashboard assistant called--what else--Cortana--off the now famous AI program in the Halo series. And she would, according to Microsoft, be the best thing ever.
 

"On Xbox One, Cortana becomes your personal gaming assistant. Cortana helps you elevate your game, gets smarter over time, and works across all your Windows 10 PCs, tablets and phones. Through voice commands on Xbox One, Cortana will assist you to more quickly find great games, new challengers and friends on Xbox Live, or accomplish common tasks."

Sounds like it could either be great or annoying. Whatever it’ll be, however, we’ll need to wait another year to find out--because according to Microsoft, the release of Xbox One's Cortana has officially been pushed back to next November--so one more year until we’re officially living in the world of Science Fiction.

This comes to us via Larry Hryb, the director for programming at Xbox Live, who said:
 

"Our plan is to add Cortana to the Xbox One experience preview later this year. From there, we'll ensure that the experience is tuned for gamers before we officially launch Cortana in 2016."

Fair enough, I suppose. As near as we’ve been told, Cortana is free anyway, and something as complex as is being promised is going to need some work to get down perfect, so, we have that to look forward too in the coming months. And, if news leaks that Microsoft has been overtaken by a malicious artificial intelligence, we’ll know where it came from!

That’ll be fun.