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)

Debugging Lex chatbots

As with Alexa skills, there are a few different places that can cause errors in your chatbot. Here are a few things you need to check:

  • You are using the correct utterances
  • Your intent has a text response or is triggering the correct Lambda
  • Your intent has been saved and the chatbot built and deployed
  • Your connected platform is properly configured (Facebook, Slack, API)
  • Your Lambdas are working

Check your utterances

If Lex is saying that it couldn't understand what you said, then it couldn't match your utterance to an intent. There are two ways this can happen: you don't have any sample utterances close enough to the utterance you used, or there are two sample utterances on different...