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

Building the Factly Skill


Now, since we understand how data flows to and from our Factly Skill, it is time to actually build it. For this purpose, we will build the actual Lambda via the Amazon Developer portal.

We will assume that the reader knows about and has already signed up to the Amazon Developer portal, and is already aware of the basic starter information about the Amazon Alexa Skills Developer Portal, since this has also been already covered in detail in Chapter 2, Hello World, Alexa!. We already covered account creation and other basic details for the Amazon Developer Portal in Chapter 2, Hello World, Alexa!, sowe will not be repeating those here.

We shall begin with the skill creation:

  1. On the Skill builder checklist, select Invocation Name to navigate to the Invocation name screen and provide the skill with an invocation name, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 4.14: Alexa Skills dashboard – Adding Invocation Name

Save these changes by clicking on theSave Model button. Once...