Amazon and Microsoft want their AI assistants to be friends. Here's what that really means. (MSFT, AMZN, AAPL, GOOG, GOOGL)

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August 30, 2017 11:36 PM

Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana are playing nice. Here's what it means.

On Wednesday, Microsoft and Amazon made a surprise announcement: Cortana and Alexa, their respective AI-based voice assistants, will work together.

Or, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos succinctly put it in a tweet: "Alexa has made a new friend."

For anyone following the rise of artificial intelligence and the spread of virtual assistants into our everyday lives, this feels like a big moment.

Your home could soon be inhabited by multiple virtual beings — each already capable of talking to you — now also communicating with each other.

In real life, though, it's going to be a lot longer, if ever, before this AI friendship really pays off for you, the customer. Here's why.

The big idea

Despite the shortcomings of the current Alexa-Cortana partnership,

It means that there's going to be a war for your home: Your toaster may use a different voice assistant than your fridge, which may be incompatible with all the home entertainment system in your living room. When you say "hello" to your home, it may answer back in a veritable chorus of different voices.

That's the kind of chaotic scenario that nobody wants.

One obvious solution is to buy gadgets that support only one company's particular assistant, similar to today's iPhone or Windows ecosystems. But with the overall virtual assistant market still very much in flux, it may be a while before things settle down to the point where there are any real "safe," future-proofed options.

That makes the automatic voice assistant aggregation envisioned by Bezos the sanest way to deal with the explosion of intelligence in the living room and office. But this system will only live up to its true potential and catch on with consumers if the gang of virtual assistants are able talk to each other on their own, without too many constraints. And for now, that's still science fiction.

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