Tech giant Microsoft's smart personal and speech assistant Cortana has been running on the company's Windows Mobile platforms for over a year, with an updated version expected to be running on Windows 10, which is slated to be launched later this year. However, one of the biggest announcements is that Cortana will be available on Google's Android and Apple's iOS platforms as a standalone app later this year. The smart assistant will be compatible on both smartphones and tablets.

According to Reuters, Eric Horvitz, who is the managing director of Microsoft Research, states:

"This kind of technology, which can read and understand email, will play a central role in the next roll out of Cortana, which we are working on now for the fall time frame. We're defining the competitive landscape... of who can provide the most supportive services that make life easier, keep track of things, that complement human memory in a way that helps us get things done."

No doubt the company's primary focus will be to shift users away from Apple's Siri and Google's Google Now features, which is why Microsoft is also immersed in working on an advanced version of Cortana and through the research compiled from its artificial intelligence project called "Einstein," the tech firm will be looking to augment the overall user experience to the next level.

The first time Microsoft released its personal assistant was back in 1995, when the company released Microsoft Bob. The primary objective was to make the user experience of using a computer relatively easy, but the venture ended up in an abysmal failure. Further down the road, Microsoft released its Office Assistant named 'Clippy', but that too suffered the same fate as Bob.

Learning from its past errors, Microsoft will be looking to heat up the competition for both Google and Apple, in both the mobile platform and artificial intelligence categories.