Cross-industry collaboration Announced in a blog post today, Microsoft said the institute will look for ways to directly integrate AI research into Cortana. The organisation is being co-funded by Microsoft Research, Cortana Research and the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. The Institute is unique in its intention to directly combine research with real-world implementation. Currently, AI researchers tend to operate independently of the engineers building applications such as Cortana. The Cortana Intelligence Institute will bridge the gap, providing researchers and engineers with a two-way link to each other.

During Microsoft's earnings call earlier this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Cortana digital assistant has its own strength when compared to other assistants like Alexa as Cortana has a lot of unique information sources to draw from, including Windows 10, Office 365, Xbox and more. It's good to to see Satya's defending for Cortana, but I would like to see his words in action. The rate at which Cortana is gaining capabilities is nowhere near to Alexa or Google Assistant. Similar to how Windows Phone was never able to catch up with 3rd apps ecosystem, Cortana will never be able to catch up with Alexa's 3rd party skills ecosystem. According my sources inside Microsoft, Microsoft is not even considering Cortana as a as true competitor to Alexa.

The company on Thursday announced the establishment of the Cortana Intelligence Institute, a collaboration with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology focused on broadening the capabilities of its virtual assistant. RMIT, as the university is most commonly known, is Australia's largest by enrollment. Researchers from the school will work with Microsoft personnel to apply AI to new tasks that currently can't be handled by neural networks.