Book Image

Voice User Interface Projects

By : Lee
Book Image

Voice User Interface Projects

By: 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)

Creating a web service endpoint to handle skill requests

In the previous sections, you created a Henry's Kitchen skill that sends the recipe ideas. The Node.js server endpoint will fulfill Henry's Kitchen skill requests by querying a third-party service called Spoonacular (https://spoonacular.com/food-api). Spoonacular will provide food recommendations to the endpoint service to construct the response that will be sent back to the user.

Here are the steps necessary to create Node.js code for the endpoint web service:

  1. Open Visual Studio Code.
  2. You are going to write some Node.js codes to handle Alexa skill requests. Before you begin, create three files:
    • server.js: This is the Node.js server's entrypoint to execute the server code.
    • package.json: This contains the Node.js dependencies required to execute server.js. When you type npm install on the Node.js Command...