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


We do hope that you enjoyed creating the Factly Skill. As with the previous skills, the Factly Skill still has room for a lot of improvement. For example, currently it only hosts three questions, which can be extended to 30 or even 300 questions, and that alone will convert this skill to a serious quiz game.

Also, we are only handling two intents. We can extend the skill to handle even more intents, which can deal with the repetition of questions and other sorts of replies from users (for example, "I don't know," "Pass," or "Next question").

Persistence with DynamoDB was something brand new that we introduced and learned about in this chapter, and the idea itself can be extended to persist multiple things such as user scores, user progress, and overall game state. We left these improvements as an exercise for the user to hone their skills even further.

In the next chapter, we will extend our Alexa knowledge even further by creating an Alexa Skill that is more oriented towards something...