14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's personal assistant Cortana is coming to the desktop as well, a company employee confirmed, thus putting an end to rumors that emerged soon after Redmond presented the new feature for the first time at the BUILD 2014 developer conference in April.
The employee, who uses the name Talderon, claims to be working for Microsoft on new Windows Phone improvements, but also has knowledge of some of the improvements that the company might be releasing in the coming months on other platforms.
In a post on the WPCentral forums, Talderon explained that Cortana for the desktop is in the works right now and it's very likely to be released sometime in the near future on Windows 8.1 or a newer OS version.
“For the record, Cortana WILL BE coming to other platforms, for ALL PC's and Tablets, you will need to be on Windows 8.1 or higher (PC versions and RT) as well as Xbox One,” he posted.
The “Windows 8.1 or higher” note might actually be an indication that development of the desktop version of Cortana has only recently started, so the company might actually delay its public release until a new edition of the Windows operating system is released.
The next Windows in line is Windows 9, which according to some people close to the matter is very likely to see daylight in April 2015. Of course, the addition of Cortana in Windows 9 would be the perfect timing, especially because the majority of users expect the new OS version to come with quite a lot of improvements, so Cortana could clearly fit this new release.
Windows 9 is also very likely to bring back the Start menu, a feature that was removed in Windows 8 and is now under development at Microsoft.
The company confirmed at the same BUILD developer conference in April that the Start menu is set to return in a future Windows 8.1 update, but according to some recent reports, it actually decided to delay the release of such a feature until early 2015.
Cortana, on the other hand, is clearly one of the features that must be part of the desktop version of Windows and as weird as it might seem to be to talk to your computer, there's no doubt that there's clearly a market for this too. It remains to be seen when Microsoft is ready to share more details about this, so we'll keep you posted.