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But Mr. Bezos and Mr. Nadella are concerned that keeping assistants from working together could hold them back. The way they see it, each assistant has unique strengths that could benefit the other assistants.
In an interview last Friday at one of Amazon’s Seattle high-rises, Mr. Bezos predicted that over time people would turn to different digital assistants — also called “A.I.s,” for artificial intelligence — the same way they turn to one friend for advice about hiking and another for restaurant recommendations.
“I want them to have access to as many of those A.I.s as possible.” Mr. Bezos said.
As an example, Mr. Bezos cited Cortana's superior integration with Outlook, the popular calendar and email application that is part of the Microsoft Office suite of software. Because Microsoft controls both products, Outlook is integrated more deeply with Cortana than with other voice assistants. Through its collaboration with Microsoft, Amazon said, Alexa users will get answers to some of the same questions that Cortana can now answer — for instance, when is the next budget review with the boss?
Initially, getting the two systems to work together is going to be a little awkward. Someone working with an Alexa device will have to say “Alexa, Open Cortana” followed by their command, while someone starting with a Cortana machine will have to say “Cortana, Open Alexa.”
The Amazon-Microsoft partnership started in May 2016, when Mr. Bezos raised the idea with Mr. Nadella at Microsoft’s CEO Summit, an annual event for business leaders in the Seattle area. Mr. Nadella was receptive to the idea, so a short while later Mr. Bezos emailed a draft of a brief news release that described how their assistants would work together, both men said.
It is standard at Amazon to create such news releases for internal consumption as part of what Mr. Bezos calls the company’s “working backward process.” Through that exercise, Amazon’s teams depict in writing how a new product or service will look to its customers before engineers write a line of code.
In a phone interview, Mr. Nadella compared digital assistants like Cortana and Alexa to competing web browsers that provide access to the same pools of online information. “The personality and expertise of each one will be such that if they interoperated, the user will get more out of it,” he said. “That resonated for me and for him, and then that’s what led to the teams working.”
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