Microsoft takes aim at Alexa with Cortana Skills Kit

Amazon's Alexa is miles ahead of rivals like Microsoft and Google with its "skills" -- around 10,000 mini-apps that let you use your voice to control your lights or music, order an Uber, learn first aid and more. To help close that gap, Microsoft has finally launched the Cortana Skills Kit in a public preview, allowing developers to build new skills or convert them from Alexa or Microsoft's new Bot Framework. Developers will be able to use the kit to build skills and publish them to a new Cortana channel on its Bot Framework. Right now, the skills will work on Cortana for Windows 10, Android, iOS and the recently announced Cortana-enabled Harman Kardon Invoke speaker. A key piece of Microsoft's Cortana strategy is Echo-like hardware, but it hasn't revealed its own device (yet).