ALX306_Build a Game Skill for Echo Buttons!

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
B uild a Game S kill for E cho B uttons!
A L X 3 0 6

PRESENTED BY:
Chachi Kruel
Senior Software
Development
Manager, Alexa
Nathan Grice
Senior
Solutions
Architect, Alexa
Kyle McGee
Senior Business
Development
Lead, Alexa
Cami Williams
Senior
Evangelist,
Alexa
Jenn Jinong
Senior Developer
Advocate,
Alexa

Welcome to the Echo Game Buttons Workshop
Agenda
• Are you in the right session? Are you here for the hands-on workshop?
• Alexa Skills Tech Review (10 mins)
• Overview of Echo Button skills (5 mins)
• New Interfaces for Game Engine and Gadget Commands (10 mins)
• Resources, Samples and Guides
• Labs 1-3
• Team Demos
• Game skill pitch-off. Tell us your best game idea!

Welcome to the Echo Game Buttons Workshop
Before we get started, to do the labs you need to:
• Download the lab https://s3.amazonaws.com/alx306/ALX306.zip
• Go to this URL: https://alexa171.typeform.com/to/uYOnU9
• Fill out the quick survey and provide your account details.
• Get into groups of 2-3 per Dot/Button set.
• From the group, whoever has a Developer Portal Account and an AWS account,
register the Echo dot to your account.
• Feel free register the device now, or wait until the start of Lab 1 and we can help

Alexa Skills Tech Review
A quick review of what Alexa skills are, the interaction flow, components and requests/responses expected

Alexa Skills Tech Review
What is an Alexa skill?
What is the user interaction flow?
Request
Audio
Response
Your
Service
Text to Speech
Machine Learning
Natural Language
Understanding
Speech
Recognition
Cards

Alexa Skills Review – Skill Components
What components are needed for creating a skill?
Language Model
Intents
Utterances
Slots
+
AWS Lambda

Alexa Skill – Request & Response

Overview of Echo Button skills
How are skills different for Echo Buttons?
Understanding different modalities - Voice vs Buttons

Button Events Flow

Understanding InputHandler Events
Speech
Button Events
Alexa Service
ASR/NLU
GameEngine
Intent Events
AWS
Lambda
(your skill
code)GameEngine
Events

New Interfaces for Game Engine and
Gadget Commands

GameEngine.StartInputHandler
• A new directive block in your response
• Contains instructions for listening to button events
• Important concepts
• Timeout
• Proxies
• Recognizers
• Events
• Docs: http://amzn.to/2zY3Cw6

Sample GameEngine.StartInputHandler directive
• Contains list of recognizers that define
button actions to track in the game engine
• Each recognizer contains a pattern that can
match on color, actions and optionally,
specific buttons via named gadgetIDs
• Contains list of named events bound to
meets and fails recognizer statements
using boolean ‘and’ logic. i.e. more than
one named recognizer in a meets property
means they both must be fulfilled to fire the
event to your lambda function

GadgetController.SetLight Directive
• Generically speaking, sends an animation to a light on a gadget
• 24-bit RGB colors
• Optional blending
• 3 triggers: “none”, “buttonDown”, “buttonUp”
• You can stack more than one in each
request to send different animations and
different triggers to different buttons
• Docs: http://amzn.to/2A3QJyC

GadgetController.SetLight Example directive
• Can be directed at a list of gadgetIDs in
the targetGadgets list
• Contains a list of sequence objects that
designate the duration, color, intensity and
fade/blend behavior that will be executed
in order based on the triggerEvent
• triggerEvent that is one of ‘none’,
‘buttonDown’ or ‘buttonUp’. Tells the
button on what action to start the
animation. ‘none’ means play without
waiting for button action
• triggerEventTimeMs is how long to wait
after the trigger even to play the animation

Standard skill response & shouldEndSession
Skills return a value in their responses normally indicating if the
Alexa device should listen for voice input from the user. This has an
effect on game skills
1. shouldEndSession = true, close the session
2. shouldEndSession = false, don’t close the session, open the mic
for voice input
3. shouldEndSession = null/undefined, don’t close the session but
DON’T open the mic for voice input
Listening for Echo Button input? shouldEndSession = null

Lab 1: Hello Buttons
Goal: Get a working skill that exercises the new directives
• Create new skill in the developer portal
• Declare the skill’s support for Echo Buttons in the skill definition
• Create a new Lambda function in AWS Lambda to handle
skill requests
• Upload the HelloButtons skill provided as part of the Lab 1 guide
• Successfully test the sample skill using your Echo buttons

Resources & Tools
• Gadget API Docs: http://amzn.to/2jgTBjH
• GameEngine.StartInputHandler http://amzn.to/2zY3Cw6
• GadgetController.SetLight http://amzn.to/2A3QJyC
• All Labs and this deck (pdf):
https://s3.amazonaws.com/alx306/alx306.zip
• Lab 1: https://s3.amazonaws.com/alx306/ALX306-lab1.zip

Lab 1 Recap and Prep for Lab 2
• Ship It!
• Created new skill that declares Echo Button support
• Create new Lambda function that supports Alexa
Skill Triggers
• Launch skill and successfully test a button
• Lab 2 Demo
• Pitch Off Contest

Lab 2: De e p dive on Game Eng ine .StartI npu tHandler
and Gadg e tC ontrolle r.Se tLig ht
• Inspect the provided GameEngine.StartInputHandler directive and learn
how it affects event behavior to your skill
• Modify the existing GameEngine.StartInputHandler such that it performs
something called a roll call to declare player intent to play game.
• Inspect the provided GadgetController.SetLight directives and learn how
it affects button animations
• Modify LaunchRequest response to change the color of the buttons that
declared themselves eligible to play by participating in the roll call above
• Note: if you didn’t finish Lab 1, don’t worry, there is a fully working
sample in the zip file for Lab 1.

Getting in the weeds - GameEngine
The GameEngine is:
• A new service in Alexa that listens for button
events based on rules you specify from your skills.
The GameEngine has two primary directives
available to skill developers
• GameEngine.StartInputHandler which is a signal
to the service layer, based on a set of Recognizer
objects you specify, that will trigger an event to
your lambda function.
• GameEngine.StopInputHandler is a construct for
terminating any input handlers you might have
running when you need to stop gameplay to
address something else in the skill, like if a user
asks for help.

Getting in the weeds - GadgetController
The GadgetController is
• A generic Alexa Gadgets interface used to control devices connected to Alexa endpoints, of which the Echo
buttons are the first physical manifestation of an Alexa Gadget.
The GadgetController has:
• A SetLight directive to set different animations on the buttons
• Can be used for things like visual cues important to gameplay
• Green when correct
• Red when wrong
• Blue for ‘ready to buzz in’
• More detail available in your lab guides

Lab 2: Resources & Tools
• Gadget API Docs: http://amzn.to/2jgTBjH
• GameEngine.StartInputHandler http://amzn.to/2zY3Cw6
• GadgetController.SetLight http://amzn.to/2A3QJyC
• All Labs and this deck (pdf):
https://s3.amazonaws.com/alx306/alx306.zip

Lab 2 Recap and Prep for Lab 3
• Ship It!
• Understand GameEngine directives
• Modify GameEngine directive to support a roll call
• Understand GadgetController directives
• Modify GadgetController directive to change
button animations
• Lab 2 Demo
• Lab 3 Demo

Lab 3 : Add voice intent to change button
to your favorite color
• Add new utterances to the language model to support new
voice interaction
• Add new Intent ’FavoriteColorIntent’ to handle this interaction
in your lambda function.
• Allow for voice input that matches on a spoken color
• Modify button animation to change the button to that color.

Demos
• Show us your demo!

THANK YOU!
D o n ’ t f o r g e t t o r a t e t h i s s e s s i o n !

ALX306_Build a Game Skill for Echo Buttons!

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