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 Handsfree Messenger Skill


With our Twilio backend in place, we now need to configure the Alexa Skill. For this, we will configure via the Amazon Developer portal.

We will assume that the reader knows and has already signed up to the Amazon Developer portal, and is already aware of basic starter information about the Amazon Alexa Skills Developer portal. We have already covered account creation and other basic details for the Amazon Developer portal in the last chapter, hence we would not be repeating those here.

We will start with skill creation:

  1. On the Create a new skill screen, please provide the skill with a name:

Figure 3.16: Creating the Handsfree Messenger skill

Please save these changes and move on to the next screen by using the Next button at the top right of the screen.

  1. In this step, we shall choose a model for our skill.

Note

We have already covered the specifics of choosing a model in Chapter 2, Hello World, Alexa!, so we won't be going into much detail here. Please select...