Author: Shannon Lowder

Shannon Lowder is the Database Engineer you’ve been looking for!
Look no further for expertise in:
Business Analysis to gather the business requirements for the database; Database Architecting to design the logical design of the database; Database Development to actually build the objects needed by the business logic; finally, Database Administration to keep the database running in top form, and making sure there is a disaster recovery plan.

Web: www.toyboxcreations.net

20180208 by Shannon Lowder 0 comments

Alexa Telemetry Data

When you build an Alexa skill you’ve got two rich sources of information describing how users are interacting with your skill. The first is the data in the Alexa Skills Kit request object. The request object is the JSON representation of what you said to your Alexa device. Alexa Voice Service(AVS) takes your spoken words…

20180207 by Shannon Lowder 0 comments

Building our Alexa Skill Function

In putting together the demo for this blog, I found there is an issue when saving data to the Alexa Session data. I can’t reliably write to this collection in the request/response JSON. Without this ability, I’d have to write a session manager myself. Honestly, I don’t have time for that. I’ve reached out to…

20180130 by Shannon Lowder 0 comments

Building our Alexa Skill

Currently, there are two ways we can construct our skill. You can use the Amazon developer portal, or you can use the Alexa Skills Kit Command Line Interface (ASK CLI). Unfortunately, the CLI option is based in Node.js. I’m not a fan, thus the reason I started writing my skills in C# instead. Alexa Skills Kit…