A year after joining forces to integrate their voice assistants, Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today rolled out the capability into public preview.

The integration is available in public preview to all U.S. customers with supported devices. Accessing Cortana via Alexa requires a smart speaker from Amazon’s Echo series, while the reverse is possible on Windows 10 devices and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s Harman Kardon Invoke speakers.

The companies are positioning the integration as a way for users to combine the two assistants’ respective strengths. In particular, Amazon and Microsoft prioritized integrating Alexa’s consumer-oriented features with the capabilities that Cortana provides for interacting with other other Microsoft services.

“In the real world, no one relies on one person for all their needs — fixing a car’s engine requires different skills than offering financial advice or caring for a baby,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post. “So it makes sense that people would rely on two digital assistants to stay on top of their home and work lives — but also want the two of them to work together at times.”

With the integration, Echo owners can now have Cortana read out emails, check their calendars and record to-do items. Over in Cortana, users can invoke Amazon’s assistant to place and track online purchases as well as to control other smart devices. The latter feature takes advantage of the extensive support for Alexa among hardware makers, an area where Cortana has lagged behind so far.  

Both companies have a lot to gain from the integration. As Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SiliconANGLE after the partnership’s announcement last year, “this agreement makes strategic sense as Alexa gets access to over 500 million Windows 10 seats and also gets access to high-quality productivity skills. Cortana gets access to very diverse Alexa consumer and home automation skills.”

The integration is fairly limited on launch. Core capabilities such as music streaming and alarms, which are both a big part of why consumers use smart assistants, aren’t yet supported. The companies plan to expand the integration over time, as well as widen the range of supported devices.

Microsoft and Amazon may look to improve the user experience too. Consumers currently have to say, “Hey Cortana, open Alexa” or “Alexa, open Cortana” every time depending on which assistant they’re using. Given that the whole idea behind the integration is to streamline interactions, the companies might in the future move to remove this extra step to make their software even more competitive against Apple Inc.’s Siri and Google LLC’s Home.

Photo: Amazon