Experts among the people: Cortana ported to the Android platform

Microsoft's digital personal assistant Cortana has become the goddess of many technology geeks after its release. Unfortunately, "dating" this goddess is currently only possible on the Windows platform.

In March this year, Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research, revealed to Reuters that Cortana plans to be launched on iOS and Android platforms as an independent application this fall. Since then, there has been no movement, and instead a private technical team took the lead in "realizing" this idea.

An Italian team called OrangeSec announced the results of their efforts at the Droidcon 2015 conference: Portaña, Cortana ported to the Android platform. Although it has a similar name and "appearance" to Cortana, they are not the same thing in essence.

The OrangeSec team combined hardware proxy, custom SSL certificates and domain name server spoofing to come up with Portaña. However, despite all the effort, Portaña is not easy to use.

First of all, users must be connected to the Internet to use Portaña. OrangeSec claims that although Portaña runs on the Android platform, it retrieves data from Microsoft's backend servers, so it cannot be used without an Internet connection. Relying on Microsoft's backend servers also means that Portaña cannot integrate or call many of the underlying functions of the Android system. In addition, Portaña currently only recognizes Italian.

OrangeSec revealed that the Portaña project was largely intended to prove that Cortana could be ported to other platforms. This gave many fans hope of using Cortana on other platforms.

VentureBeat asked Microsoft about Portaña, but Microsoft did not respond directly:

We believe that the best Cortana experience can only be delivered on our Windows Phone and Windows 10 Technical Preview platforms.

In fact, this is not the first time Cortana has been hacked. In May 2014, hackers from Onion.io successfully hacked Cortana. Through voice commands, Cortana can directly turn on and off light bulbs, and can also call the printer to print out what the controller says.