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 6. Home Automation with Alexa

"Communication must be HOT. That's Honest, Open, and Two-Way."

– Dan Oswald

As we progress through this book, the skills we create are evolving too. We started with a simple Hello World Skill and went on to create an SMS sender, a trivia game, a skill that talks about cryptocurrencies, and in this chapter, we will be working on Ambience Manager, which can tell us the ambience parameters, such as the temperature and humidity, of our homes.

We will be designing this skill by covering the following topics:

  • Introduction to Home Automation and Ambient Sensors
  • Designing the Ambience Manager Skill
  • Developing the Mobile App
  • Developing the Ambience Manager Skill

This chapter will be covering a lot of ground since our Ambience Manager Skill will be communicating with an ambient sensor, hence it will also involve the details regarding the ambient sensor as well as a mobile app, which will help us in uploading the temperature data to the cloud.