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

Chapter 4. Let's Play Factly with Alexa

"The human voice is the most perfect instrument of all."

– Arvo Part

We have been making progress by leaps and bounds in our quest to become an Alexa Skills Jedi. We started by designing a Hello World Alexa Skill, which made us understand the finer details of a basic Alexa Skill. Armed with that knowledge, we continued to expand our arsenal by developing a slightly more advanced Alexa Skill, which also communicated with a third-party backend (Twilio).

In this chapter, we will take a slight detour and create a self-contained skill called Factly. Factly will be a trivia/quiz-oriented Alexa Skill that can quiz a user regarding various facts. It will be a self-contained skill and will not be communicating to any third-party APIs/backends.

We shall do this by covering the following topics in this chapter:

  • Motivation for Designing Factly
  • Designing the Factly Skill
  • Building the Factly Skill

Without much further ado, let's begin with an overview of the design of the...