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Cyanogen reportedly planning "deep Cortana integration" for Cyanogen OS

In a recent interview, Cyanogen's CEO revealed that the company is working with Microsoft to bring deep Cortana integration into Cyanogen OS.
By
September 11, 2015
Cortana-for-Android-7

Back in April we first learned of Microsoft and Cyanogen’s new “strategic partnership”, which would see the inclusion of select apps like Bing, Skype, Office, and a few others. This only applied to the commercial Cyanogen OS and not CyanogenMod ROMs, though the announcement still was met with with mixed reception. Now it looks like Cyanogen and Microsoft are getting ready to expand that relationship, this time by baking in Cortana integration into Cyanogen OS.

In an interview with International Business Times, the notorious Cyanogen CEO Kirt McMaster revealed that Microsoft and Cyanogen are working to bring Microsoft’s digital assistant over to the OS but in a way that goes much deeper than the current Cortana Android app.

Natural language coupled with intelligence is very important but as an application it doesn’t really work because you need to be embedded into the framework of the OS because that is where you get all the signal from the services that makes that intelligence smarter.

The idea is that Cortana could be used to do a lot more than just an app can accomplish, baking it into the UI’s controls, allowing it to be used in apps, and the list goes on. Not a lot more than that is known just yet, though supposedly we can expect to see the first fruits of this integration in the next major version of Cyanogen OS.

Cyanogen has made it clear on more than one occasion that, despite being built on the Android backbone, the company has big plans for the OS and hopes to separate its association with Google, at least to some degree. For now, though, Cyanogen continues to be pretty stock-like in many ways and utilizes Google services like the Play Store. McMaster envisions a time when this won’t be the case, though most of us doubt that Cyanogen could every really stand on its own.

What do you think of the idea of deeper Cortana integration with Cyanogen OS?