In June, Microsoft announced it would be ending support for its Cortana voice assistant before the end of 2023. In August, it disabled support for the Cortana Windows 11 app. Today, the company revealed plans to remove support for Cortana in both Microsoft Teams Rooms and Teams Display device.
In fact, according to this blog post, the deprecation process for Cortana in those Microsoft Teams services already started on September 15. Over the course of the coming weeks, Teams Rooms and Teams Display devices "will no longer support Cortana voice assistance, both push-to-talk capability and wake word detection". The blog added that those users "will no longer be able to invoke Cortana via the push-to-talk button" nor will they be able to use the keyword "Cortana" on those services and devices soon.
Microsoft stated that Teams Rooms and Teams Display users will still have a number of ways to access features that would have been handled via Cortana:
Users who leveraged Cortana voice assistance to complete tasks such as joining, starting, or ending a meeting, adding a name or number, and calling can complete these tasks manually via the console or touch screen interface. Rooms equipped with Certified for Teams intelligent speakers can continue to use the device for meeting audio and intelligent voice attributed transcription.
The blog post added that Microsoft will be "delivering exciting new AI features to help customers work faster and smarter" and that it is "dedicated to helping customers who have adopted Microsoft voice assistance technologies make a smooth transition."
Details about these new AI features were not mentioned. However, it's likely we could see Teams Rooms and Teams Display devices gain access to generative AI features like Bing Chat and Windows Copilot with voice assistance options sometime in the very near future. We could find out more later this week at Microsoft's press event on September 21.
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