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Alexa Ask Jarvis to Create Me
a Serverless App
Aleksandar Simovic
Senior Engineer
ScienceExchange
S R V 3 1 5
Slobodan Stojanović
CTO
Cloud Horizon

“One in six Americans now owns a smart
speaker.”
NPR and Edison Research
January 2018

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Amazon Alexa
• 11% of all Americans own an Amazon Alexa device
• More than 50,000 skills
• Over 20,000 Alexa-enabled device types
• Over 100,000 developers in 180 countries

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Virtual assistants have become an
everyday reality!

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Amazon Alexa
• Get information about anything
• Organize, plan, set tasks
• Order anything
• With the newest skills, even find parking with your
Echo Auto

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But can we build something?
Anything?

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We’re still far away from ….

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Marvel’s Jarvis from the Marvel’s movie “Iron Man”
• Helps Tony Stark find and build a new suit
• Keeps track of all the components
• Can order and assemble them virtually

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Building apps using a virtual assistant
is a dream.

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or is it …

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Live demo

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Wait …
Where does this all come from?

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AWS Serverless Application Repository
With serverless your components
are well defined as services.
On the last re:Invent,
AWS Serverless Application
Repository was launched!

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So you’re saying …

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So you’re saying … to ask Alexa to
assemble serverless app using Serverless
App Repo components?

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Meet Jarvis

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Architecture overview
Users
Alexa, ask
Jarvis Alexa skillAlexaEcho
Search for a
component /
application
Send Intent
Slots Analyze Syntax
Store applications
and services info
Invoke Jarvis
Serverless Jarvis
Learn which
component suits a
purpose

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If you ever wanted to build a Jarvis how
would you start?

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Jarvis
Usually people start by building a reciter.
But how do we work on our projects?
One business = application.
Complex business processes are decomposed to simple ones.
Simple business processes are easily converted to serverless components.
We don’t work on apps in a streamlined, but multitasking manner.

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How do we build on?

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Jarvis
We need to find a way how do we translate a simple business process “create
a service to save data to a database” to an AWS Serverless Application
Repository component.
What does a process consist of?
Input, process, output.
Ok, how do we know what’s an input and what’s an output?
We still some help!

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Welcome Amazon Comprehend and
Amazon SageMaker!

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How should we do things?
How do we get the sentence?
Alexa Intent Search Query.
How do we analyze the sentence?
Amazon Comprehend Syntax Analysis.
How do we detect what is a process structure?
Get the Subject, Predicate, Object structure.

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How should we do things?
How do we get the process?
Convert the structure to an input, process, and output.
How do we know which component based on process?
Search the App Repo for such serverless components.
How do we deploy it and track it?
Deploy the component and store it in the AWS CloudFormation and Amazon
Dynamo DB.

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Ready?

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Technologies that we will use
• Alexa Skill - Required
• AWS Serverless Application Repository - Required
• Comprehend - Required
• Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Lex and Amazon
SageMaker are optional, they are for big teams or teams
that finish early.

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Workshop
• This is a real Level 300 Advanced workshop. But don’t worry ☺
• Minimum 3 members per team.
• Divide the tasks by your experience. There are easy, medium and hard tasks.
Each team should have at least one member capable of doing the hard task.
• Tasks and instructions are available in Github repository, mentors are here to
help you. Feel free to ask anything, there are no stupid questions!

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Agenda
Introduction ands teams setup (15 minutes)
Working on separate components (1 hour)
Assembling components (30 minutes)
Presenting solutions (20 minutes)
Workshop summary (10 minutes)

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Important note
Serverless Jarvis is still experimental tech
Conversational programming is future, but no one did it yet for production
So have fun, and try to learn something and break things ☺

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Time to work!
https://bit.ly/serverless-jarvis-workshop

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Summary
• Building your own Serverless Jarvis is not that hard, as we have all the services
in place, what we are doing is just application glue.
• Serverless Jarvis is not that deterministic, but there is a way. (Demo)
• Security is a concern. (How do you know that this component is trustworthy?)
• Is it really the future?

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By Simon Wardley
Amazon

Thank you!
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Aleksandar Simovic
@simalexan
Slobodan Stojanović
@slobodan_

Please complete the session
survey in the mobile app.
!
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