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 5. Making Alexa Talk About CryptoCurrencies

"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."

– William Gibson

We designed a trivia game, called Factly, with Alexa in the last chapter. In this chapter, as promised, we are going to work on something that, at the time of writing this book, has taken the whole world by storm and, as you may have guessed from the chapter's title, it is cryptocurrencies.

In this chapter, we will be building a Skill called CryptoOracle (yes, we do understand it is a bad naming choice both in terms of syntax, semantics, and Alexa Skill-naming rules, but since we are not going to publish it yet, we are going to stick with this name) that can make Alexa talk about the latest prices of various cryptocurrencies. We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • A Brief Introduction to Cryptocurrencies
  • Designing the CryptoOracle skill
  • Building the CryptoOracle skill

Let's begin.