Microsoft Corp. is looking to make its Cortana voice assistant available as a native “skill” for Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa and Google Assistant as part of a new push to court consumers.

Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella (pictured) shared the plan during a press event earlier this week. His remarks, which were made public today, indicate that Microsoft has more or less given up trying up to compete directly with Alexa and Google Assistant.

It’s not hard to see the reasoning behind the decision. The two services boast a massive a market share advantage over Cortana. According to data from analyst firm Canalys, Amazon’s Alexa powered nearly 75 percent of the roughly 20 million smart speakers that were sold during in third quarter of 2018, while Google Assistant accounted for practically all the rest.

Nadella said that Cortana could extend the services’ capabilities to make them more useful for users.

“Would it be better off, for example, to make Cortana a valuable skill that someone who is using Alexa can call? Or should we try to compete with Alexa? We, quite frankly, decided that we would do the former. Because Cortana needs to be that skill for anyone who is a Microsoft Office 365 subscriber,” Nadella was quoted as saying.

The CEO hinted that the Cortana skills will launch as part of the consumer version of Microsoft 365 the company has been rumored to be developing. Microsoft 365 is a subscription bundle geared toward enterprises that includes Windows 10, Office 365 and certain other offerings.

“I think about Microsoft 365 as a two-sided market,” Nadella reportedly said. “What we are doing with Office 365 or what we will soon be talking about as Microsoft 365 consumer subscriptions, those would be again completely consumer businesses.”

These subscriptions will build on the existing integrations that Cortana provides for Office 365. The voice assistant can read out appointments in a user’s Outlook calendar, flag unusual events such as an urgent meeting and even estimate how long their morning commute will take, to name a few features. Microsoft’s planned Cortana skill for competing assistants would bring these capabilities to users’ existing smart speakers.

The company already provides limited support for Alexa. In August, Microsoft and Amazon launched an integration that introduced the ability to invoke Alexa from a Cortana-powered device or vice versa for a narrow set of tasks.

Photo: Microsoft