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

An Introduction to Amazon Echo


Often, the term Amazon Echo is used synonymously with Alexa. However, although both are interrelated, they point to very different things—Amazon Echo is the actual smart speaker (hardware), which is a gateway to Amazon's Alexa Skills service via an interactive voice-based personal assistant.

Amazon Echo has a whole device family and hence comes in many flavors, all of which are discussed in the following sections.

Amazon Echo – First Generation

Amazon Echo was the original first generation flagship smart speaker from Amazon. It requires a wireless internet connection to work as its voice capability (Alexa) is based on a cloud computing service by Amazon:

Figure 2.1: A first generation Amazon Echo

The initial setup of Amazon Echo can be done via the Alexa mobile app, available for both of the major mobile platforms (iOS and Android) and can also be done via the Alexa web portal.

To enable it to reach users of varied economic capacities, Amazon has introduced Amazon...