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)

Understanding Chatbots

To create successful chatbots using Alexa or Lex, you first need to understand the components that make up a chatbot. These parts can then be used to create conversation diagrams and flow diagrams, helping visualize the user's path through the conversation. Being able to have this map for the user's conversation makes building chatbots far easier and quicker.

Toward the end of the chapter, we will also introduce Alexa and Lex and have a look at their similarities and differences. We'll also have a quick look at some of the use cases for each of them.

The chapter will explain the following topics:

  • Introducing chatbots
  • Designing conversation flow diagrams
  • Best practices
  • Amazon Alexa and Amazon Lex