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)

Launching your skill

To launch your skill to the Alexa Skill Store, we need to move to the next tab. This is where you will set up the information that will be present on the Alexa Skill Store. You need to give your skill a unique name, short and long descriptions, and example utterances. Then you get to upload an icon and select the category and keywords for your skill. The category and keywords should be carefully considered as this is probably how users are going to find your skills.

The last part on this page is the privacy policy and terms of use URLs. You need to have these if you are going to have a skill in the skills store. There are lots of examples out there and they shouldn't be very complicated for skills that don't store or even ask for user information. Any app that does use and store user information will need a more detailed privacy policy and it may...