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…
Tag: Alexa
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…
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…
Alexa Design Process
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. …
Alexa Solutions Infrastructure
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…
Alexa Terminology and Documentation
n my last article, I introduced the hardware, the differences between the Alexa Voice Service (speech recognition and language understanding) and the Alexa Skills Kit (new and interesting abilities you can create for the Alexa ecosystem). I also covered four current skills categories. Today let’s cover some key terms you’ll want to understand before beginning your…
Introduction to Alexa
When I received the first pre-order email for an Amazon Echo in late 2014, I was excited by this new technology. I pre-ordered right away. The Echo became the first of many devices that tied into the Alexa Voice Service (AVS). This voice service encapsulates both speech recognition as well as Natural Language Understanding features. …