Microsoft’s former AI expert, Qi Lu, moved to Chinese search giant Baidu earlier this year. Lu spent time working on Cortana and Microsoft’s bot platform whilst he was at the software giant, along with heading up the company’s Bing search and Office teams. In an interview with Wired, Lu has provided some rare insight into Microsoft’s struggles to compete with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant.

“I worked on Cortana four and a half years ago. At the time we all were like, ‘Amazon, yeah, that technology is so far behind,’” says Lu. “Google and Microsoft, technologically, were ahead of Amazon by a wide margin. But look at the AI race today. The Amazon Alexa ecosystem is far ahead of anybody else in the United States. It’s because they got the…

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