Public Preview of Cortana Skills Kit Launched by Microsoft

Harman Kardon is working on a new smart speaker Cortana-powered Invoke launching under Microsoft that makes the company to enter into the smart speaker market officially. For 2017 launch, Microsoft will also take some facts from Amazon’s Echo to enlarge its functionality area by adding to the device’s initial capabilities that includes voice-controlled music playback, making and receiving calls via Skype, accomplishing several tasks under the personal digital assistant of Microsoft, using “skills” that can be tap by developers to unite their services. 

A Cortana skill kit was launched in a public preview held today by Microsoft. The developers will be permitted by the Software Development Kit (SDK) to generate third-party “skills” by building and publishing a bot to the Bot Framework’s new Cortana channel providing the ease of using same code to those who are already using Microsoft's Bot Framework. All devices with Cortana including Android, Windows10 devices and iOS and Cortana powered speakers as well will access the Cortana Skills Kit.   

A complete list of his early partners comprising Domino’s iHeartRadio, OpenTable, Expedia, Capital One, TuneIn, weather notification service Dark Sky and others has been posted here by Microsoft. These are still at the mouth of preview stage and in the coming time, arrival of many others is also expected.   

Following Harman Kardon, HP is also upcoming with a Cortana- powered speaker. On the other hand, Intel is enabling other hardware vendors to generate their own Cortana-powered devices by providing them a reference platform.

Source: http://lenapcexpert.blogspot.in/2017/05/public-preview-of-cortana-skills-kit.html