Cortana Skills Documentation

• Get Started
  • Build a skill
    • 

      Learn about Cortana Skills Kit

      An introduction to Cortana Skills.

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      Create your first skill

      Skills are speech-enabled bots. This section identifies the Bot Framework components that you use to create a skill.

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      Personalize your skill

      Learn how to get information that Cortana knows about the user so you can personalize the user’s experience with your skill.

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      Add authentication to your skill

      If your skill uses a service that requires OAuth, learn how easy it is to have Cortana manage the flow for you.

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      Language understanding

      Learn how LUIS and Cognitive Services can help your skill understand language.

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      Make your skill smarter

      Add intelligence to skills with Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services.

  • Design skills
    • 

      Principles of Cortana skill design

      Learn about good voice and UI design that’s essential for a positive user experience.

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      Invocation name guidelines

      Lean about the do’s and don’ts of naming your skill and the invocation phrases that users use to invoke it.

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      Performance guidelines

      Learn about design choices that impact performance.

    
    
  • Test skills
    • 

      Testing and debugging

      Learn about the options for testing and debugging your skill.

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      Known issues

      Provides a list of known issues and possible workarounds.

    
    
  • Publish skills
    • 

      Publishing Cortana skills

      Describes the steps used to publish your skill to the different deployment environments.

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      Cortana Skills Kit review guidelines

      Ready to publish your skill to the world? Read this guide to make sure you comply.

    
    
• Reference
  • • 

      Speech Synthesis Markup Language

      Learn how to use SSML to control characteristics of synthetic speech such as pitch, rate, volume, and pronunciation.

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      User profile and contextual information

      Provide a personalized exper-ience to end uses by leveraging user profile and contextual information available in Cortana.

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      Supported locales

      Find out about the list of locales that Cortana supports.

    
    
• Resources
  • • 

      Support

      Having an issue with your skill? Find out where you can get help.

    • 

      FAQs

      Learn what others are asking and see answers to their questions.

    • 

      Terms of use guidelines

      Get a sample Terms of Use.

    • 

      Privacy policy guidelines

      Learn about Cortana’s privacy policy requirements and where you can get help generating one.

    • 

      Samples

      Get a list of samples that can help you get started using the different skill features.

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      Blog

      Stay current with what’s happening in the Cortana Skills world such as new features and upcoming events.