Today, two of the Voice personal assistant (VPA) giants got together and decided to cooperate on creating a big-time social party between their voice services. Alexa and Cortana are now BFFs (see Gartner analyst Werner Goertz’s take here).

They say good things come to those who wait, and I have been waiting on this since VPAs first appeared on the scene. Bezos and Nadella opened the door to a new round of capability by dropping the barriers between different voice domains and raising the stakes on creating what I call an “insight ecosystem” driven by voice interactions and accessing all kinds of data, tasks, and notifications.

You can see it coming – “Alexa, ask Cortana for the pictures of my last Hawaii trip!”, and they show up from your surface and end up on your echo show screen – Or, “Cortana, ask Alexa to put my mom’s flight info on my calendar”. It means we won’t have to depend on one provider knowing all the answers or handling all of my requests.