Book Image

Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex

By : Sam Williams
Book Image

Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex

By: Sam Williams

Overview of this book

Have you ever wondered how Alexa apps are made, how voice-enabled technologies work, or how chatbots function? And why tech giants such as Amazon and Google are investing in voice technologies? A better question is: why should I start developing on these platforms? Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex covers all features of the Alexa Skills kit with real-world examples that help you develop skills to integrate Echo and chatbots into Facebook, Slack, and Twilio with the Amazon Lex platform. The book starts with teaching you how to set up your local environment and AWS CLI so that you can automate the process of uploading AWS Lambda from your local machine. You will then learn to develop Alexa Skills and Lex chatbots using Lambda functions to control functionality. Once you’ve come to grips with this, you will learn to create increasingly complex chatbots, integrate Amazon S3, and change the way Alexa talks to the user. In the concluding chapters, we shift our focus to Amazon Lex and messaging chatbots. We will explore Alexa, learn about DynamoDB databases, and add cards to user conversations. By the end of this book, you will have explored a full set of technologies that will enable you to create your own voice and messaging chatbots using Amazon.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we have learned about Amazon Web Services and created an account, giving us access to all of these services.

We created our first Lambda function using the Lambda Console, and advanced it to use multiple functions, template strings, and requiring in code from other files.

Next, we discussed the three main ways to create Lambdas, namely the Lambda Console, Cloud9, and using local development. We also looked at the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Finally, we used the AWS-CLI and Git to make our local development setup far more powerful. The build script that we used allows us to create and update Lambdas without ever having to go onto AWS.

In the next chapter, we will learn to build our first Alexa Skills using the Alexa Skills Kit.