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 3. Hands-Free Experience with Alexa

"The tongue can paint what the eyes can't see."

– Chinese Proverb

We moved on from learning about the details of Echo and Alexa to designing a basic Alexa Skill. We also gained some familiarity with the anatomy of a basic Alexa Skill and how the various moving parts in a skill interact with each other.

In this chapter, we take our design skills a little further and create a slightly more advanced skill. Our skill is called Handsfree Messenger and it will allow the user to leverage Alexa to send SMSes in a hands-free manner, just using Alexa and Echo, without any interaction with his/her phone. We will use a custom service called Twilio, which allows a user/developer to make/receive phone calls programmatically and send/receive text messages using web service APIs, in addition to AWS, where we will be hosting our Lambda.

We do this by covering the following topics in this chapter:

  • Overview of the Handsfree Messenger Skill
  • Configuring the Twilio Messaging...