Amazon and Microsoft agree their voice assistants will talk (to each other)

Those betting big on AI making voice the dominant user interface of the future are not betting so big as to believe their respective artificially intelligent voice assistants will be the sole vocal oracle that Internet users want or need. And so Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Amazon's Jeff Bezos are today announcing a tie-up, which will -- at an unspecified point later this year -- enable users of the latter's Alexa voice assistant to ask her to summon Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant to ask it to do stuff, and vice versa. Here are the pair's respective statements on the move: Quoth Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft: "Ensuring Cortana is available for our customers everywhere and across any device is a key priority for us. Bringing Cortana's knowledge, Office 365 integration, commitments, and reminders to Alexa is a great step toward that goal." Said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, Amazon: "The world is big and so multifaceted. There are going to be multiple successful intelligent agents, each with access to different sets of data and with different specialized skill areas. Together, their strengths will complement each other and provide customers with a richer and even more helpful experience. It's great for Echo owners to get easy access to Cortana."