The same week Salesforce announced their Einstein voice assistant ahead of their annual gathering Dreamforce, Microsoft launched Cortana Skills Kit for the Enterprise for developers, to help businesses create custom voice apps for their employees and users, at Ignite, their annual gathering. This was expected, given the company strong stance on the enterprise. I have mentioned before that I see at this time Microsoft strategy in voice tech seems to be more focused on providing AI tools to developers, and again, you know what I’m gonna say developers are the currency for today’s platforms.
Cortana Skill Kit is currently available by invitation only. Invitations for companies and developers will be made available in the future.
According to a programme manager on Cortana’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.
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.