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

A Brief Introduction to Cryptocurrencies


For those who came late and missed the massive hype that Bitcoin and other similar cryptocurrencies, generated especially during 2017 and onward: cryptocurrencies are digital/virtual currencies, that is, unlike physical currencies, such as the dollar, euro or rupee, cryptocurrencies exist just as entries in a distributed database (usually). Various cryptographic techniques are deployed to record cryptocurrency transactions and their generation, and so these digital currencies are generically known as cryptocurrencies.

Note

Since cryptographic techniques are beyond the scope of this book, we won't be covering them here.

As of the time of writing this chapter, there are more than 1,500 cryptocurrencies available, and thebettercryptocurrencies out of those 1,500 cryptocurrencies serve a unique purpose.

Note

You can check the number of known/traded cryptocurrencies by navigating to CoinMarketCap at https://coinmarketcap.com/.

Some cryptocurrencies are used...