Microsoft has been touting Cortana as a key reason for people to buy Windows Phones and by all accounts it’s an extremely impressive voice-enabled personal assistant — and now it looks like there’s one way it’s clearly ahead of Siri and Google Now. Nokia is touting a new series of products from connected home company INSTEON that promise to let you control key home appliances such as thermostats and Wi-Fi enabled cameras using voice commands issued through Cortana.
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The INSTEON Home Kit includes “an INSTEON Hub, thermostat, camera, on/off module, open/close sensor, and motion sensor” and sells for $299.99. Nokia says that the system now lets you use voice commands to do things like turn off lights or turn up the temperature in your home thanks to its integration with Cortana.
This integration with smart home products puts Cortana ahead of Siri and Google Now. Although Apple announced that its HomeKit software development kit would allow developers to create connected home apps that integrate with Siri, this feature still hasn’t been implemented yet. From that perspective, it’s particularly impressive that Cortana can already support such apps and devices since the software make its debut just earlier this year.
