If you regularly chatted up the Cortana bot in Skype, you'll have to bid farewell. Microsoft has disabled the bot, while simultaneously promoting Skype's integration with Amazon's Alexa, which debuted for Echo speakers last fall.
The Cortana bot would allow you to query Microsoft's digital assistant for basic requests, as well as add things to your calendar and more. As of now, messaging the bot through an existing chat thread results in no response. As pointed out by Florian B on Twitter (via Tech Radar) Microsoft has also started alerting Skype users that the Cortana bot is "no longer supported in Skype." The notification says that existing conversations will remain available until April 30.
Cortana will remain as a part of Skype in a way, however. You can still enable Cortana suggestions in Skype's settings, which will use a bit of AI smarts to give you suggested replies in your chat threads.
e.g. this is where I see/use Cortana still; this is not part of the recent notification that went out re: bots pic.twitter.com/o93WzLuRswe.g. this is where I see/use Cortana still; this is not part of the recent notification that went out re: bots pic.twitter.com/o93WzLuRsw— Daniel Rubino (@Daniel_Rubino) March 28, 2019March 28, 2019
The Cortana bot's disappearance coincides with what appears to be the retreat of bots across Skype altogether. Since being updated to the "new" Skype, the bot directory has disappeared from the app. Likewise, other bots, such as Skyscanner and Microsoft's Project Murphy, appear to be out of the picture as well.
As the Cortana bot leaves Skype, Microsoft has also sent out a notification drawing attention to the service's integration with Amazon's Alexa, which allows you to make Skype calls on Echo devices. The company is currently running a promotion that will give you 200 free calling minutes in Skype for linking your Amazon and Microsoft accounts.
