Book Image

Alexa Skills Projects

By : Madhur Bhargava
Book Image

Alexa Skills Projects

By: Madhur Bhargava

Overview of this book

Amazon Echo is a smart speaker developed by Amazon, which connects to Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service and is entirely controlled by voice commands. Amazon Echo is currently being used for a variety of purposes such as home automation, asking generic queries, and even ordering a cab or pizza. Alexa Skills Projects starts with a basic introduction to Amazon Alexa and Echo. You will then deep dive into Alexa Programming concepts such as Intents, Slots, Lambdas and maintaining your skill’s state using DynamoDB. You will get a clear understanding of how some of the most popular Alexa Skills work, and gain experience of working with real-world Amazon Echo applications. In the concluding chapters, you will explore the future of voice-enabled applications and their coverage with respect to the Internet of Things. By the end of the book, you will have learned to design Alexa Skills for specific purposes and interact with Amazon Echo to execute these skills.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we covered the evolution of interactive voice-based personal assistants and the various factors involved in their move from a user's smartphone to their smart home. We also saw the various interactive voice-based personal assistants in the smartphone, desktop, and smart home markets, and the capabilities of each.

Our goal was to get the reader familiar with the history of interactive voice-based personal assistants so that over the course of the book, we can direct our focus onto Alexa, the interactive personal assistant bundled with Amazon Echo. The next chapter will enable the reader to understand the anatomy of an Alexa Skill and to hands-on program an Amazon Echo so that Alexa can learn to say one of the oldest phrases in computer programming, "Hello, World."