Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise – BUILD 2019 Update

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Cortana Skills Kit Blog articles.

Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise opens the door for enterprises to more effectively utilize and extend Cortana to help their employees be more productive. With the development platform, organizations can cut down on the time spent on completing line of business or mundane day-to-day tasks by converting them into conversational experiences (skills). People at work can complete line of business (LOB) tasks using natural language and voice input. The Skills Kit is end-to-end platform that enables developers to build skills, IT Admins to manage/deploy those skills, and end users to use them with Cortana on Windows.

 

Since the initial launch at Ignite last year, the Cortana team has been working with several enterprises under the Technology Adoption Program. These enterprises span a wide set of industry sectors such as retail, manufacturing, IT Services, healthcare, and more. They are leveraging the platform to build skills for several domains of application such as IT Support, HR Services, Sales/CRM, Finance, etc. These skills help employees' complete tasks like filing time offs, creating service ticket, finding subject matter expert, etc. in just a few seconds using natural language without having to switch to other apps or services. Organizations are now better equipped to help their employees focus on their priorities and rely on Cortana to take care of the rest.

 

Here is an example of the IT Support skill that Microsoft CSE (formerly known as Microsoft IT) has built for Microsoft Employees

 

Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise is built on top of Azure Bot Service and leverages Azure Active Directory to manage building, testing and deployment of the custom skills within the tenant. Since Ignite last year, we have further improved the development experience and added additional deployment and management controls based on customer feedback. Here are some of the most recent updates:

 

  • We have improved the developer experience by enabling multiple developers in a team to edit and manage the Cortana channel registration configuration for the bot. With this feature, teams can access and make changes to the skill registration without waiting for the creator of the skill.
  • Enterprises often need to restrict usage of skills to certain groups or departments within the organization to ensure information is available to appropriate employees only. For example, sales team might want to deploy “Sales Agent” to people within Sales department only. With improved manageability, IT Admins can now deploy enterprise private skills to security group/s of users. Thus, enterprises can now limit the discovery of skills to a limited group of users, collect feedback, improve the skill and then deploy to entire tenant if required.

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