Amazon Alexa is a voice-based personal assistant developed by Amazon. The product first featured as an interface for Amazon Echo devices, which went on to inspire the Google Home devices by Google, which use Google Assistant. Other competitors of Alexa are Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri. As a virtual assistant, Alexa can easily set up calls, schedule meetings, or play songs. The various tasks that Alexa can perform are called skills in the Alexa terminology, which we'll be following in this section.
Skills in Alexa are the main core of how we can bring functionality to the platform. Each skill needs to be invoked from the primary interface of Alexa, whereupon the skill takes over the entire functionality unless the program logic completes or the user explicitly asks for the skill to end. Skills apply the logic for the task to...