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

Comparing Various Voice-Based Assistants


Although we have already discussed and compared various voice-based assistants to some extent in Chapter 1, What is Alexa?, in this section we will limit our discussion to voice-enabled speakers that host these assistants.

As of 2018, there are only a few major players in the voice-enabled speaker market (source: voicebot.ai), namely Amazon, which holds the lion's share of 52%, then Google Home, standing at 32%, Apple's HomePod at 12%, and the rest of the market is divided between several other players, as depicted in the following pie chart:

Figure 7.4: Alexa Skills – distribution of smart speaker market

We will cover three of the major players in this section; Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod.

Amazon Echo

Introduced in November 2014, the Echo series of smart speakers by Amazon had the first mover's advantage in the voice-computing market, which enabled it to grab the lion's share of 70% of the complete market. But that is not the only thing...