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

Motivation for Designing Factly


Before we dive deep into the details of the Factly Alexa Skill, let's try to understand the reason for our choice of creating this Skill by understanding what people use voice assistants for.

In a study done by Statista on smartphone users in the UK, it was revealed that people who use voice assistants use them mainly for Amusement, which is second only to Search for general information, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 4.1: Most common uses of voice assistants 

With this insight, it is no surprise also that the lion's share of Alexa Skills on the Amazon Alexa App Store belongs to games and trivia apps:

Figure 4.2: Alexa Skills categorisation on Amazon Alexa App Store

Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, this is very similar to the distribution of apps in the smartphone market:

Figure 4.3: App domain dominance on Google Play and Apple's App Store

The majority of apps published are games, for both the Android and iOS platforms.

Users spent the most time on apps...