Back in 2010 Microsoft released Windows Phone 7. It was a huge change from the Pocket PC/Windows Mobile OS which had preceded it and while it brought a modern UI and app-store infrastructure it missed a number of pieces of core functionality from the older phones. One of these was support for Tasks. I set about writing an app which became “Tasks In The Hand” and became very popular in those early days. Even when Microsoft later added basic Tasks functionality in Windows Phone 7.5 the app still had a healthy following because it supported views and features absent from the in-box app.
Skipping forward to today Microsoft’s Task story is rather different. After purchasing Wunderlist they began writing a new app called Microsoft To-Do which is available across multiple platforms – iOS and Android for mobile and Windows for desktop. Crucially though, under the hood, it’s still based on Office 365 (or Outlook.com for personal Microsoft IDs) for storage and so works just as well with the traditional Tasks view in Outlook on the desktop.
Back in 2010 we did not have voice assistants but now we have Alexa, Google Home and Cortana. If you get used to using Microsoft To-Do everywhere, as I have, you miss having integration with a voice assistant and so that is where I decided Tasks In The Hand needed to go next. Today my Alexa Skill was released into the store for anyone to connect with their Echo or similar device.
Tasks In The Hand in the Alexa Store
The skill links with your Microsoft ID, which is either associated with an Office 365 account or an Outlook.com personal account. Once setup you can add tasks to your Alexa To-Do list or items to your Amazon Shopping List and they’ll synchronise with your Microsoft account. You can modify, complete or delete these items via Microsoft To-Do and those changes are synched back to Alexa. After you’ve linked accounts any items you add to your default Tasks folder or Amazon Shopping List folder will also be synchronised with Alexa.
The Skill was built using Azure Functions and I found Matteo Pagani‘s series of Blog posts very useful with getting started working with Alexa Skill Kit. It uses Tim Heuer‘s excellent Alexa.NET package to handle the interactions with Amazon.
The skill is completely free, I hope you find it as useful as I have and please get in touch if you have any feedback.
In The Hand Ltd 