Windows 10: Microsoft announces new Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise

Brink · Sep 24, 2018

In a classic scene from the 1999 cult film Office Space, programmer Peter Gibbons is admonished for attaching the wrong cover sheet to a “TPS” report. Nearly two decades later, Microsoft is unveiling a platform for enterprises to enable the personal intelligent assistant Cortana to complete company-specific tasks, including correctly filing TPS reports.

The Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise was presented Monday at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida. The development platform is currently available by invitation only.

“At heart, we are about providing valuable assistance to users throughout their day. That assistance takes different forms depending on where the users are in their day and what they are trying to do,” said Javier Soltero, the Microsoft corporate vice president in charge of Cortana. “It’s important for enterprises to be able to enable their workforces to use Cortana to perform company-specific tasks.”

The development platform is powered by the Azure Bot Service and leverages Language Understanding from Azure Cognitive Services, allowing developers to create company-specific skills for Cortana using known and trusted tools, explained Vivek Goswami, a program manager on Soltero’s team. Additional features include control via Azure Active Directory over when skills are deployed and who can access them.

Soltero said the extension of Cortana skills development to enterprises is the start of a journey into a realm where voice and natural language are the primary means of interacting with technology.

“In the same way you don’t have to go around teaching people how to use a smartphone because they know how to touch and swipe, we have arrived there with voice, we are finally to, ‘Okay, now what can you do?’” he said.
The specific skills that enterprises will create for Cortana remain to be revealed, noted Goswami, who imagined scenarios ranging from human resources to smart building features such as a skill that allows employees to ask the personal intelligent assistant to schedule an office cleaning, saving 20 to 30 minutes of intranet surfing to make the arrangements themselves.

As a proof of concept, IT developers at Microsoft used the enterprise platform to create an IT help desk skill that enables Cortana to file tickets for employees who are having computer problems and connect them to someone who can help.

“One of the things that holds people back from getting better service from a help desk is the often-laborious task of filing the ticket in the first place,” noted Soltero. “You don’t bother because you’re in the middle of something so you restart the app or reboot your computer. You endure pain in different forms instead of actually getting the issue resolved.”

Now, a simple, natural language verbal request to Cortana frees Microsoft employees “to stay in the flow of what they are doing,” he added.

If such experiences prove successful in the workplace, modern workforce employees will be more likely to access Cortana outside of work, too. After all, few people carry two phones – one for work, one for personal use. Instead, they have one phone that’s loaded with both work apps and personal apps, work email and personal email, a work calendar and personal calendar.

“We can enable the blurring of those lines without compromising privacy or enterprise utility and, at the same time, delight the user,” explained Soltero, who led the successful development of the Outlook app for iOS and Android prior to working on Cortana.
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Source: Microsoft releases platform to build company-specific skills for Cortana - The AI Blog

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Brink · Sep 24, 2018

Microsoft announces Cortana Skills Kit in public preview

Microsoft announced today at Build 2017 a public preview of its Cortana Skills Kit that allows developers to create voice apps for the intelligent assistant.

The Cortana Skills Kit will allow developers to:

Leverage bots created with the Microsoft Bot Framework and publish them to Cortana as a new skill

Integrate their web services as skills and re-purpose code from their existing Alexa skills to create Cortana skills

Connect users to skills when users ask, and proactively present skills to users in the appropriate context

Personalize their users' experiences by leveraging Cortana’s understanding of users' preferences and context, based on user permissions

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See:

Cortana's got skills

Cortana Skills Kit - Windows app development

Brink · Sep 24, 2018

Microsoft to open up about its Cortana Skills Kit at Build

Microsoft's initial Build 2017 session list is available, and several Cortana Skills briefings are on the list, signaling the public preview of the Skills Kit is finally ready to go.

Microsoft looks ready to widen its Cortana Skills Kit availability as of next week, simultaneous with its Build 2017 developer conference in Seattle.

Microsoft has published its schedule and session descriptions for many of its Build 2017 talks via its official Build schedule builder mobile application. (I downloaded a version from the Google Play Store today for my Android phone.)

The session list includes several Cortana Skills Kit-themed sessions happening Wednesday May 10 and Thursday May 11.

Microsoft officials said they were planning to launch the public preview of its Cortana Skills Kit at the end of February 2017. But the company's planned date for doing this came and went with no update for the past two months.

Microsoft originally announced plans for the Cortana Skills Kit and Devices software development kit in December 2016. At that time, Microsoft officials said the Skills Kit would be for developers who want to build new features and apps for Cortana on Windows, Android, iOS, Xbox, and upcoming new Cortana-powered devices...
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Read more: Microsoft to open up about its Cortana Skills Kit at Build | ZDNet

Brink · Sep 24, 2018

Cortana Skills Kit empowers developers to build intelligent experience

Today, we are pleased to announce the public preview of the Cortana Skills Kit which allows developers to easily create intelligent, personalized experiences for Cortana.

Our vision for Cortana has always been to create a digital personal assistant that’s available to users across all their devices, whenever and wherever they may need an extra hand to be more productive and get things done. With the new Cortana Skills Kit, developers can join in delivering that vision and reach millions of Cortana users across platforms including Windows 10, Android, iOS and soon on even more devices and form factors — like Xbox, the Harman Kardon Invoke smart speaker and inside cars and mixed reality devices.

To build a Cortana skill, developers can create their bot’s conversational logic using the Microsoft Bot Framework, and publish it to the new Cortana Channel within the Bot Framework, bringing speech capabilities to skills. Developers can understand users’ natural input and build custom machine-learned language models through LUIS.ai, and add intelligence with the power of Cognitive Services.

Cortana has rich knowledge and understanding about the user with the Skills Kit, developers can now access knowledge about the user and build highly-relevant, personalized experiences based on the user’s preferences and context. Cortana only shares information with the user’s consent.

We realize that we are at the dawn of building conversational experiences for end users. Developers want to reach a large and diverse set of users to understand user needs and behaviors. There are over 145M monthly active users of Cortana worldwide. With the Cortana Skills Kit, developers can immediately reach the 60M users in the US and grow their international reach in the future*. To start building skills today, please visit https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/Cortana.

We are also excited to announce a wide range of partners who have joined us on this journey and are building Cortana skills. Cortana users will be able to access skills from OpenTable, Expedia, Capital One, StubHub, Food Network, HP, iHeartRadio, Stubhub, Dominos, TuneIn, Uber, CapitalOne, Knowmail, MovieTickets.com, Tact, Skyscanner, Fresh Digital, Gigskr, Gupshup, The Motley Fool, Mybuddy, Patron, Porch, Razorfish, StarFish Mint, Talklocal, UPS, WebMD, Pylon, BigOven, CityFalcon, DarkSky, Elokence, BLT Robotics, Wed Guild, AI Games, XAPP Media, GameOn, MegaSuperWeb, Verge and Vokkal.co.

To learn more and discover the currently available skills visit: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/cortana/cortana-skills/

*Available in US only. Other markets will be added over time.
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Source: Cortana Skills Kit empowers developers to build intelligent experiences for millions of users - Building Apps for Windows

Windows 10: Microsoft announces new Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise

Microsoft announces new Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise

Microsoft announces new Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise

Microsoft announces new Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise

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