KiteBuddy: Integrating Cortana Voice Commands into your Windows Phone 8.1 app

When the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK was released, it came with a bunch of new interesting things you could do as an app developer. One of these things is the new API for integrating your app into the speech recognition experience in Windows Phone 8.1.

To get an introduction to how this works I recommend watching session 2-530 from this year’s BUILD conference. Avery Bishop, Rob Chambers and Monica Smith did a great job presenting the new capabilities, demonstrating the actual functionality as well showing how easy it is to set up from a developer point of view. Check out the session on Channel 9 here: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-530

There are also a few articles on MSDN that serve as good resources for learning more about how it works. You should check out these three:

• Quickstart: Voice commands (Windows Phone Store apps using C#/VB/C++ and XAML)
• Voice command element and attribute reference (Windows Phone Store apps using C#/VB/C++ and XAML)
• How to activate an app (XAML)

In this blog post, I will show how I integrated Voice Commands into my app, KiteBuddy. I will demonstrate how it works from a user perspective as well as the actual Voice Command Definition XML file behind it. Shoot me a comment below the article if you have any questions to how this works. I will be happy to help out! :-)

Voice Command Definition XML

See the XML of the Voice Command Definition installed with the app here: