Book Image

Voice User Interface Projects

By : Henry Lee
Book Image

Voice User Interface Projects

By: Henry Lee

Overview of this book

From touchscreen and mouse-click, we are moving to voice- and conversation-based user interfaces. By adopting Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), you can create a more compelling and engaging experience for your users. Voice User Interface Projects teaches you how to develop voice-enabled applications for desktop, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This book explains in detail VUI and its importance, basic design principles of VUI, fundamentals of conversation, and the different voice-enabled applications available in the market. You will learn how to build your first voice-enabled application by utilizing DialogFlow and Alexa’s natural language processing (NLP) platform. Once you are comfortable with building voice-enabled applications, you will understand how to dynamically process and respond to the questions by using NodeJS server deployed to the cloud. You will then move on to securing NodeJS RESTful API for DialogFlow and Alexa webhooks, creating unit tests and building voice-enabled podcasts for cars. Last but not the least you will discover advanced topics such as handling sessions, creating custom intents, and extending built-in intents in order to build conversational VUIs that will help engage the users. By the end of the book, you will have grasped a thorough knowledge of how to design and develop interactive VUIs.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Introducing the ASK

In 2014, Amazon introduced voice interaction capabilities such as setting an alarm, playing music, streaming podcasts, playing audio books, and providing traffic and weather reports through Amazon Echo devices. In order to make Amazon Echo extensible through third-party applications, the ASK was introduced as a software developer kit. The ASK processes natural language spoken to Amazon Echo devices. Just as Dialogflow processes the speech of users received from Google Home devices into machine-understandable code, the ASK will do the exact same thing for Amazon Echo devices. By 2017, Alexa had grown to having over 5,000 employees working on it and the adoption of Alexa continues to grow, grabbing 70% of the market share (https://bit.ly/2Nj7tY6) alongside Google Home.

There are three ways to build with the ASK:

  • Using graphical user interfaces by logging in...