Cortana’s rumored new name shows Microsoft’s voice assistant really means business

“Hey Microsoft 365 Assistant, tell me an Excel joke”

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Cortana,Windows 10’s digital assistant, could be set to get a new name, and it’ll be far less snappy, a recent rumor contends – but it will reflect the new business focus of the virtual assistant.

According to that font of allMicrosoftknowledge,Brad Sams, Cortana might be rechristened Microsoft 365 Assistant. So yeah, like we said –farless snappy.

Sams reckons that Microsoft has been using the name Microsoft 365 Assistant internally within the company for some time now, so given that, and the repositioning ofCortanawith a productivity focus, he believes the name could become official before long.

Productive times

As we’ve seen in recent times withWindows 10, Cortana has been decoupled from theoperating system’s search function andturned into a separate app, and most recently, Microsoft has announced big changes tostrip away Cortana’s smart home skills and make it a productivity tool.

This all goes along with what the software giant has been saying for a some time now – that it wants totransition the digital assistant awayfrom being a direct competitor to the likes ofGoogleAssistant, Siri or Alexa, to being more of the complementary tool.

Cortana’s productivity makeover should happen with the next version of Windows 10 (20H1), due out in the near-ish future –possibly April or May– and that could just be when the new name comes into force.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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