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

Hello Alexa – Building a Hello World Alexa Skill


This section addresses the final goal of this chapter, that is, actually writing our first Alexa Skill. However, please note that we do have a few prerequisites before we embark on the final leg of our journey through this chapter. For the success of this exercise, each user will need to have an Amazon Developer account. Signing up for an Amazon Developer account is a simple and straightforward process. The user can sign up for an account at https://developer.amazon.com.

Signing up is a three-step process and includes providing personal information, accepting terms of service, and providing a payment method.

Note

Please note that although signing up requires you to provide Amazon with a payment method, Amazon will charge you if, and only if, you end up using any of the paid services. However, over the course of this book, we will be restricting our usage to free tier and will not be using any of the paid services.

Signing up for an Amazon Developer...