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

Chapter 2. Hello World, Alexa!

"The human voice is the organ of the soul."

                                   – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the previous chapter, we discussed the evolution of various voice-based personal assistants, discussed the capabilities of each of those, and finally compared two significant smart home-based personal assistants, namely Alexa and Google Home.

In this chapter, we will focus on Alexa. We will first learn about Amazon Echo, the smart speaker from Amazon, which enables a user to interact with Alexa and its various flavors. Later on, we will move on to learn about the anatomy of Alexa and what goes into making Alexa so interactive. We will do so by covering the following topics:

  • An Introduction to Amazon Echo
  • Anatomy of an Alexa Skill
  • Building a Hello World Alexa Skill

We will start by introducing Amazon Echo, then move on to the finer details of Alexa and Alexa Skills.