The advent of voice computing in recent years has caused a tectonic shift, with the result being that interactive voice-based personal assistants no longer lurk in the shadows, and Amazon Alexa, Siri, and Google Now have become common household names. Apart from their traditional abodes of mobile devices, these assistants can also be found in the center of our living and dining rooms in the form of Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod devices.
This book focuses on harnessing the power of voice computing by studying Alexa, which is the interactive voice-based personal assistant used in Amazon Echo. Over the course of this book, we will embark on a journey to understand the internals of Alexa and how it works under the hood, while creating five unique Alexa Skills, each of which will be designed to address a specific purpose and a real-world use case.
I hope you enjoy the journey!
This book is aimed at everyone who is interested in learning about the underlying voice computing technology on which Amazon Echo and Alexa are based, and also learning how we can leverage that technology to create skills for Alexa oriented towards home automation, the Internet of Things, and various other domains.
Chapter 1, What Is Alexa?, is an introductory chapter that does not require any coding skills. We discuss how intelligent voice-activated personal assistants are evolving from just being passively present in mobile phones to becoming a permanent fixture in common households in the form of dedicated hardware devices.
Chapter 2, Hello World, Alexa!, will introduce the reader to the process of creating skills for Alexa and will explain how to create a basic Hello World Alexa skill.
Chapter 3, Hands-Free Experience with Alexa, will introduce a new way of sending messages using Alexa, that is, the hands-free way.
Chapter 4, Let’s Play Factly with Alexa, will create a game called Factly as an Alexa skill. We will also add persistence to it using DynamoDB.
Chapter 5, Making Alexa Talk about CryptoCurrencies, will demonstrate how Alexa can provide the latest cryptocurrency updates. The user will create an Alexa skill that can fetch the current prices of the latest cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Chapter 6, Home Automation with Alexa, will demonstrate how Alexa can integrate with other IoT devices and create the foundation of a smart home. The user will create a Weather Monitor Alexa skill that can inform the user about the climate (temperature/humidity/light) in the home.
Chapter 7, Future of Voice-Based Personal Assistants, will talk about the future of the intelligent voice-based personal assistants.
The following are the prerequisites to get the most out of this book:
- Basic familiarity with a modern programming language such as JavaScript. All of the code that we'll write for the Lambdas is based on Node.js.
- Free Tier Amazon AWS Developer account.
- Basic familiarity with code editors.
- Not mandatory, but recommended is an Amazon Alexa-enabled device, such as an Amazon Echo.
- Over the course of this book, we will be making many configuration changes via the Amazon Developer Portal. We recommend that you follow these steps as described, so a good Internet connection is highly recommended.
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There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "On the console search bar, please search for Lambda, and click on it when it appears in the list of auto-suggestions."
A block of code is set as follows:
buildSpeechletResponse = (outputText, shouldEndSession) => {
return {
outputSpeech: {
type: "PlainText",
text: outputText
},
shouldEndSession: shouldEndSession
}
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
generateResponse = (speechletResponse) => {
return {
version: "1.0",
response: speechletResponse
}
}Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."
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