Control Presentations with Cortana

Question

I'm working on a use case where I want to control Powerpoint Presentations(on Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote) using Cortana.

I've been looking for quite some time now for resources that I could leverage to learn from and implement the same.

The closest I could get to is this series of two articles:

1. Controlling Powerpoint Slideshow With Alexa
2. Controlling Powerpoint Slides With Alexa and Websocket

But the issue with this is, it's using slideshow which hasn't been updated for quite some time now and also doesn't support later versions of Keynote and Powerpoint. And mine is an enterprise level use case so the package can't be relied upon with the kind of support that it has right now.

I also had a look at Cortana Skills Kit Website but wasn't able to find anything substantial in this direction.

So the question is, is there a reliable library that I could leverage to do this? Or does Cortana Skills Kit have the capabilities to control local running instances of Powerpoint?

I'd really appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction regarding this.

UPDATE:

1. I tried achieving this by developing a PowerPoint Add-In. But then when I dived deeper, I go to know that PowerPoint Add-Ins are of the following types:

I, on the other hand, want something that could work in the Presenter mode. And I didn't find anything related to that. Basically, Contextual Mail Add-In is only for Outlook and Outlook Web. Task Pane and Content Add-In is for UI based Add-Ins. But I want a UI-less Add-In that could work and control my presentation in Presenter Mode. I tried looking for Add-In Commands but couldn't find anything related to that.

2. I also tried having a look at Office URI Schemes as suggested by Micromuncher, but I couldn't find a way to navigate from one slide to the other using these schemes.

Answer 1

The slideshow approach seems really fragile, though it is highly cool.

Pretty much all versions of PowerPoint support automation. But with DDE being mostly dead, and OLE seeming inappropriate in the Cloud, it would be nice to automate some behaviors without extensive coding.

Once upon a time, you could add a reference to an id or index to the file i.e. myPresentation.ppt#4 to show slide 4, but this no longer works.

How this should be done; a protocol handler that automates PowerPoint. Does this exist? Kind of. Right now you can use deep linking in a limited way on most platforms.

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/office-uri-schemes

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/integration/integrate-with-office-from-android-applications

But right now this just lets us open for viewing or editing a presentation without saying what page. So... about the only thing we can do is lobby our friends at Microsoft to consider this as part of their new strategy.

However, Cortana will support it when it exists.

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cortana/skills/launch-apps-from-skills