Microsoft's digital 'personal assistant' Cortana is now available on Windows Phone 8.1, Windows 10 and on Android (as a beta), with a planned launch for iOS on the cards too - and another platform will soon be added to that list.

In an interview with International Business Times, Cyanogen CEO Kirt McMaster said that Microsoft and his company were already working together to bring Cortana to the next version of Cyanogen OS. But unlike on Android - where Cortana is installed as an app with certain 'hooks' into the operating system, such as being able to replace Google Now - Cortana will be 'deeply integrated' into Cyanogen.

McMaster sounds enthusiastic about the prospect, particularly because he sees that integration as being the key to exploiting Cortana's full potential on Cyanogen OS devices:

Natural language coupled with intelligence is very important but as an application it doesn’t rally 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.

He went on to draw comparisons between Cortana and its rivals, saying that Microsoft's assistant is "much better than Apple's Siri" and Google Now in certain areas:

When Apple launched Apple Music at WWDC, they showed the Siri integration with Apple Music. Siri doesn’t power Spotify like that so we can do these kind of things with for example, integration of Microsoft’s Cortana into the OS enabling natural language to power Spotify and other services.

This isn't the first partnership between Microsoft and Cyanogen - earlier this year, the two companies announced that Bing services, Skype, OneDrive, Office and more would be bundled with Cyanogen OS.

Source: International Business Times via Windows Central