Microsoft: Already revealed Cortana insights moving to Action Center in Build 17017 changelog

Recently there have been reports about Cortana moving to the system tray and Cortana insights and actions moving to Action Center. This was interpreted as Cortana moving slowly to obsolescence. Currently, Cortana lives in your search bar and thus if you have enabled it will be invoked every time you use search on your Windows 10 PC. So, moving to system tray which is a quieter place can be interpreted in many ways.

But Brandon, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft had claimed that the reason behind this move was already explained in the changelog of Build 17017.

Microsoft wants to streamline the process to check “next actions” and that’s why moving it to Action Center. Microsoft claims that it will “free up: Cortana’s user interface so that you can get the information you need as quickly as possible.

In the previous feature updates of Windows 10 (including the Fall Creators Update), there were two places to go to see the next action you might need to take: Cortana and Action Center. We heard feedback that this was confusing as it wasn’t clear where to go. The fact that Cortana’s insights and recommended actions lived outside of Action Center also made it impossible to focus Cortana’s user interface on Cortana’s natural language and search capabilities. To fix both of these problems, Cortana’s proactive content is going to migrate to Action Center so that you have one place to go to find out what action to take next and to see the important insights Cortana has for you. This frees up Cortana’s user interface to provide tips, educating customers about what can be said to Cortana, and to provide tools for search so that you can get the information you need as quickly as possible. You will see the first part of this change starting with this build with Cortana no longer offering proactive content. Over time, you will see the proactive content that used to be available in Cortana show up in Action Center.

Brandon also sought to alleviate user’s apprehensions about this step foreshadowing Cortana’s removal in future.