Image : Microsoft

It only took a year, but Cortana is finally coming to Alexa speakers, and vice versa.


Last year in a splashy announcement in the New York Times, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed that their digital assistants, Cortana and Alexa, would be able to work on both Amazon and Microsoft platforms by the end of the year

By January, the collaboration had nothing to show for itself and there was only a demo of it at Microsoft’s developer’s conference in May.


But today, finally, nearly a year after it was first announced, Amazon and Microsoft are claiming that their rollout of the digital assistant integration has begun.

Microsoft says interested users will be able to sign up for the program and link the two services together starting sometime today. That means you’ll be able to control your smart home from your laptop, and find out about your work calendar from Alexa—a fter you first say the clunky phrase “Alexa open Cortana” or “Cortana open Alexa.”