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)

Lex utterance monitoring

When you create your intents and generate the list of utterances, you try your best to cover everything that a user might say. Unfortunately, people often come up with unique ways of saying something that you've not thought of. In this case, the user will get an "I don't understand" message from Lex. This obviously isn't great for providing a good user experience.

Luckily, Lex has built-in monitoring to allow you to see the utterances that the users have been saying. To get to these, we need to click on the Monitoring tab in Lex. Lex utterances are stored for a specific chatbot version, so we need to select a value from the dropdown next to our chatbot name.

You should now have a screen of graphs showing the Lex usage. This can be useful, but we're looking for the tables of utterances, found in the menu on the left:

Utterance...