Microsoft is killing its Siri rival, here’s why

Microsoft is expected to end the lifecycle of its AI-based assistant – Cortana– by the end of the year. The company has started rolling out a new update for Cortana’s standalone app on Windows 11 via Microsoft Store and instead of updating the experience and adding new features, it makes the app stop working.

Earlier this year, Microsoft made this official and two months later, the company has already started depreciating the standalone Cortana app via the update. However, not all Windows 11 users will be affected by this at least right now. As this is only happening for Windows 11 Insider users in Dev and Canary channels.
It is expected that Cortana will stop working soon on other insider builds followed by the stable build. This means, eventually, the standalone app of Cortana will cease to exist for all PC users.

After the update, the Cortana update started showing “Cortana in Windows as a standalone app is deprecated” along with a “Learn More” button below the message. Clicking on this redirects to the support page.
How this will affect users
This is mostly likely to affect no one considering Windows 11 does not highlight Cortana that much. Still, as per the support page, the change will only affect Windows users. Cortana on other services like Outlook, Teams, Microsoft, etc will continue to function until further notice.
The alternative you should know about
Now that Cortana is going away from Windows, there’s no AI-based assistant currently available. However, the Amazon Alexa app is available that can be used in case you want to. Or, Microsoft is already working on Windows Copilot that will bring far better features and functionality and integration compared to Cortana.
That said, Copilot is still in the development phase and it may take a while to full integrate into the operating system.