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

Introduction to Home Automation and Ambient Sensors


For introductory purposes, home automation is a concept whereby a user can control standard home fixtures such as lights, music systems, televisions, and even climate, using an array of intelligent sensors rather than the traditional flipping of switches for each individual fixture. Home automation intends to keep the physical interaction of the user with the actual hardware as minimal as possible. In the recent present and the not-so-distant past, the concept of home automation was built on top of mobile operating systems (mostly Android or iOS), where the user was able to control the whole house using just a mobile device or a tablet rather than interacting with the switches of each individual device present in the house.

With the advent of Interactive Voice Assistants, the concept of home automation has transcended to the level where a user can control a home with just their voice. The actual concept of home automation is very broad and...