Microsoft has unveiled a virtual assistant for Windows Phone handsets.
The voice-controlled app, named Cortana, uses both the firm's search engine Bing and data stored on the handsets to make personalised recommendations and carry out tasks.
Apple and Google already offer comparable facilities on their iOS and Android platforms.
But one artificial intelligence expert said Microsoft's decision to wait until now to launch could prove wise.
"Siri and Google Now have a limited ability to extract the actual meaning from the words that somebody speaks," explained Prof Steve Young, professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge.
"So, if you ask about things that Siri, for example, knows about like restaurants or baseball games, it works pretty well.
"But if you ask it about something that it's not been previously programmed to understand it simply passes the word into a search engine.
"I understand that for Cortana Microsoft has done a lot of work to automatically learn a much wider range of semantics... so the expectation is that it will be able to understand a good deal more."
The female-voiced Cortana - named after the AI system in the firm's Halo video game franchise - was unveiled by Windows Phone chief Joe Belfiore at the firm's Build developers conference in San Francisco.
It will initially be made available in the US, then next the UK and China and finally other markets as part of a wider Windows Phone 8.1 system software update.
Anticipatory app
Cortana replaces the earlier search function on smartphones running Microsoft's operating system.
When launched from a pulsating button on the handset's start screen, it initially offers its own suggestion for the task the owner might want to carry out based on their location and past behaviour.
It can then be asked to do this or instead instructed to find other information, schedule appointments, set reminders or make other apps carry out the person's command.
If the user allows the software to access their calendar, email, contacts and browsing history the app will try to anticipate their needs.
For instance it can offer to schedule a flight if it spots a message received from a travel booking service, and flag news articles it thinks the user will be interested in.
However, if some of the inferences it makes are wrong the user can enter a "notebook" function to amend the rules it follows.
"The point is the user is in control of his or her relationship with Cortana," Mr Belfiore explained.
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