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

This book has given us a practical introduction to chatbots through building increasingly complex Alexa Skills and Lex chatbots. We've learned about starting from a perfect conversation and creating flow diagrams to visualize the users' conversational path with a chatbot. Using these flow diagrams, we've built intents using utterances and slots that are handled in Lambdas.

We've improved the features and abilities of our chatbots through the use of S3 storage, DynamoDB databases, and external APIs. To improve the user experience, we also learned about using SSML to change how Alexa talks with our users, learned how to create cards to provide more visual information, and learned about search query slot types in Alexa for gathering wider ranges of slot values.

Finally, we've discussed a few great ways to build upon what we've already learned...