Shannon Lowder

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…

Let’s start designing our Receptionist skill.  The purpose of this skill will be to help visitors who come in for meetings alert the employee they’re meeting that they’ve arrived.  We want to make this interaction as natural as possible, so we don’t have to have someone walk a new visitor through the process each time. …

With an understanding of the Alexa ecosystem and some of the terminology I’ll be using, let’s look under the hood a bit today.  All Alexa devices depend on the cloud to do the heavy lifting.  In the most simplified case, this is what’s under the hood of a simple Alexa skill. You speak to your…