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


Please give yourself a pat on the back if you made it this far, having created the Hello World Greeter skill. Successful completion of this exercise proves that you just leveled up from being a novice to a Padawan. We still have a lot of skills to design before you can formally call yourself an Alexa Skills Jedi but we are off to a good start.

We hope that you now understand the anatomy of a basic Alexa Skill and the jargon surrounding it, such as Lambdas, intents, and slots. Also, you should now be able to design simple skills yourself.

In the coming chapters, we will gradually move on to slightly more complicated skills, each with an increasing level of difficulty as we proceed through each of the chapters. For example, in the next chapter, we will create an Alexa Skill that will enable us to use Alexa as a messaging medium, and from there we will move on to design other complex voice interfaces and skills, such as trivia games and smart home skills.

The future is voice!