MICROSOFT LAUNCHES CORTANA SKILLS KIT FOR DEVELOPMENT OF CUSTOM VOICE APPS

The kit will help enterprise developers use digital assistant's natural-language processing to create custom voice skills for businesses.

Currently available by invitation only, the development platform was unveiled at "Microsoft Ignite" conference in Orlando, Florida on Monday.

Microsoft is unveiling a platform for enterprises to enable the personal intelligent assistant Cortana to complete company-specific tasks, including correctly filing TPS reports, announced the American multinational technology company through a blog post.

To help businesses create custom voice apps for their employee and users,   Microsoft haslaunched the "Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise" for developers

The Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise was presented Monday at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida and 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.”

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.

Cortana, which was first demonstrated at the Microsoft Build Developer Conference in April 2013 held in San Francisco, is named after Cortana, a synthetic intelligence character in Microsoft’s Halo video game franchise originating in Bungie folklore.

The natural language processing capabilities of Cortana are derived from Tellme Networks, which was bought by Microsoft in 2007, and are coupled with a Semantic search database called Satori.

"It's important for enterprises to be able to enable their workforces to use Cortana to perform company-specific tasks," he added.

According to Vivek Goswami, a programme manager on Soltero's team, the 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.

Additional features include control via Azure Active Directory over when skills are deployed and who can access them.

"The specific skills that enterprises will create for Cortana remain to be revealed," noted Goswami.

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.