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

Summary


We hope you enjoyed creating the Crypto skill. As with the skills from the previous chapters, the CryptoOracle skill still has room for a lot of improvement. For example, currently it just fetches the price of a cryptocurrency, but you could easily modify it to fetch a lot of other parameters too. Hence we urge you to please take a closer look at the CoinMarketCap API to find out what all other parameters(for example, market cap, total supply, max supply, and so on) for a cryptocurrency it can be fetched so that you can augment the skill with more information.

Also, we are only handling two intents; we could extend the skill to handle even more intents that could deal with other user interactions.

We have left these improvements as an exercise for the user to hone their skill even further.

In the next chapter, we will extend our Alexa knowledge even further by creating an Alexa Skill that is oriented toward integrating Alexa with other smarthome devices.