Microsoft announced today that it has started rolling out Cortana inside of the Skype app for Android and iOS.

“We are bringing Cortana, Microsoft’s intelligent assistant, into Skype to help you in your everyday conversations,” the Skype Team wrote in a new blog post today. “With Cortana, we’ve added a powerful, intelligent assistant to help you with your everyday tasks right where you are and save you time.”

If this sounds like it’s been a long time coming, well, it has: Microsoft first revealed its plan to bring Cortana to Skype, as a bot, way back in April 2016 at its Build conference.

But the new Cortana integration with Skype goes a bit deeper than that. Yes, you can still manually summon Cortana by starting a new conversation with the bot, or by adding Cortana to an existing Cortana. But now, Cortana will also appear automatically in some cases, when it senses it can be useful.

“Cortana can detect when you’re talking about scheduling events or things you have to do and will recommend setting up a reminder, which you will receive on all your devices that have Cortana enabled,” Microsoft explains. “So, whether you’re talking about weekend plans or an important work appointment, nothing will slip through the cracks.”

It’s not clear yet how deep this integration is, and which actions will trigger the automatic Cortana appearances. But you should be able to find out soon enough: Cortana in Skype is being gradually rolled out, starting today, with Skype users on Android and iOS in the United States first.

Tagged with Cortana