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

Configuring the Twilio Messaging Backend


Twilio is a cloud communications platform that was founded in 2007 and is based in San Francisco. It allows a user/developer to make/receive phone calls programmatically and send/receive text messages using web service APIs. For this chapter, we shall only be demonstrating its messaging function; however, we request and anticipate that the reader will extend the functionality of this skill by adding the phone call functionality as a homework exercise.

To configure Twilio as our messaging backend, we shall be following these steps:

  1. Please navigate to www.twilio.com in your web browser, as seen in this screenshot:

Fig 3.4: Twilio landing page

  1. Please click on Get a free API key or Sign up (both will start the sign-up process for a new user) to land on the Sign up for free page shown here:

Figure 3.5: Twilio sign-up page

  1. Please fill in your personal details. As shown in the previous screenshot, there is a small questionnaire towards the bottom of the page,...