Alexa skills allow you to expand the voice assistant capabilities beyond what comes out of the box. In addition to more than 30,000 available Alexa skills out there, you can start developing your own skill tomorrow morning. This session will show you how to build your first Alexa skill using different AWS services that can help you develop and run your skill in minutes. We will cover AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 and other tools and services that will help you run your skills at scale.

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Building Alexa Skills with AWS
Boaz Ziniman
Technical Evangelist, Amazon Web Service
@ziniman
boaz.ziniman.aws

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Floor28 Agenda
GameDay
24 Oct
Enterprise IT Day
23 Oct
Builders Day
AppSync, Alexa & IoT
22 Oct
Big Data Day
14 Oct
ML & DL Day
15 Oct
DevOps Day
16 Oct
DevOps Day
17 Oct
Technical Sessions
Serverless Data Workshop
Big Data UG Meetup
Technical Sessions
SageMaker Workshop
ML&DL Meetup
Technical Sessions
K8s Workshop
DevOps Meetup
Technical Sessions
Spot Workshop
Databases Day
18 Oct
Technical Sessions
Serverless Workshop
Virtual assistants UG Meetup
Technical Sessions
PyTorch Meetup
Technical Sessions
CDK Workshop
AWS IL UG Meetup
Builders Day
Serverless backend
21 Oct
Technical Sessions

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Alexa, add “book flight” to my Todo list1Locate Phone1
Unlock Phone2
Locate and open appropriate app3
Find right To-do list, tap “Add Todo”4
Type name of task, tap “Done”5
Exit app / close phone6
Put away phone7
The “modern” way Easier, faster & more natural way
ADDING A TO DO

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Alexa, turn off the bedroom light1
Locate Phone1
Unlock Phone2
Locate and open appropriate app3
Navigate to appropriate bulb/room4
Tap “turn off light”5
Exit app / close phone6
Put away phone7
The “modern” way
Easier, faster & more natural way
Get up and walk to lights1
Turn light switch(es) to “Off”2
The old way
TURNING OFF THE LIGHTS

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Alexa, ask Ocado to add tuna to my trolley.

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Active Customers
Up Nearly 5X
Tens of Millions of
Alexa-Enabled Devices
Alexa is growing fast

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1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
HUMAN ACCURACY
50% 55%
60% 62%
70%
95%
ASR accuracy has dramatically increased in the last 4-5 years.
This inflection point has created sustained momentum in consumer adoption of
voice technology
Source: MindMeld
ASR Accuracy

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Comprised of two important frameworks that enable brands to connect to customers
ALEXA
VOICE
SERVICE
Unparalleled Distribution:
AVS allows your content
to be everywhere
Lives In The Cloud
Automated Speech
Recognition (ASR)
Natural Language
Understanding (NLU)
Always Learning
ALEXA
SKILLS
KIT
Create Great Content:
ASK is how you connect
to your consumer
Alexa’s Framework

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Alexa Identifies Skill & Recognizes
Intent Through ASR & NLU
Alexa Converts Text-to-Speech
(TTS) & Renders Graphical
Component
You Pass Back a
Textual or Audio
Response
You Pass Back a
Graphical Response
User Makes
a Request
Respond to Intent
through Text & Visual
Your Service
processes
Request
Alexa sends Customer
Intent to Your Service
Audio Stream is
sent up to Alexa
How The Alexa Skills Kit Works

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Alexa,
Speaking with Alexa
wake word

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Start
Launch
Begin
Resume
Ask
Tell
Alexa, open restaurant finder
wake word Invocation namelaunch
Speaking with Alexa

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Alexa, ask restaurant finder for breakfast
wake word Invocation namelaunch utterance
for a good breakfast place
to find places to eat in the
morning
a spot that serves the most
important meal of the day
Speaking with Alexa

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Alexa, open restaurant finder
Recommend a restaurant within four miles
slot
utterance
RecommendationIntent
{distance: “4”}
slot value
intent
Speaking with Alexa

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Tell me about Italian food within four miles
slot
RecommendationIntent
{distance: “4”}
slot value
intent
slot
{cuisine: “italian food”}
Speaking with Alexa

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Your Service
Text to Speech
Machine Learning
Natural Language
Understanding
Speech Recognition
Response
Visual
Audio
Intents
Alexa skills kit: Request and Response

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Your Service
Text to Speech
SSML, streaming audio
Machine Learning
Natural Language
Understanding
Speech Recognition
Response
Visual
Audio
Intents
Alexa skills kit: Outputs

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{size}
tiny
small
medium
large
I want a that’s energy, formy,{pet}
dog
{energy}
low
med
high
{temperament}
family
guard
Slots

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“Alexa, start outdoor guru”
“Welcome to…”
“Alexa, ask outdoor guru about kayaking ”
“Where to?”
“Portland”
“Portland?
“Yes”
“When .. leave?”
“Next Friday”
“Until when?”
“The following Tuesday”
“What will you like to do?”
““I’ll be golfing”
“Did I get all this right?”
“yes”
“I have two ideas for you…”
Slot confirmation
Intent confirmation
Slot elicitation
Multi-Turn Dialogs

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LET’S BUILD YOUR SKILL

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Blueprints – build a skill without coding!

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Voice User Interface Programming Logic
+

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Voice User Interface Programming Logic
+
developer.amazon.com aws.amazon.com

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Architecture Diagram

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What does Serverless mean?
No servers to provision
or manage
Scale with your usage
Built in availability and
fault-tolerance
Never pay for
idle/unused capacity

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AWS Lambda: Serverless computing
• Run code without servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume.
• Triggered by events or called from APIs:
• PUT to an Amazon S3 bucket
• Updates to Amazon DynamoDB table
• Call to an Amazon API Gateway endpoint
• Mobile app backend call
• And many more…
• Makes it easy to:
• Perform real-time data processing
• Build scalable backend services
• Glue and choreograph systems

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Amazon DynamoDB
• Fast and flexible NoSQL database service for any scale
Dead simple
• GetItem(primaryKey)
• PutItem(item)
Robust depth
• Fine-grained access control
• Streams
• Triggers
• Cross-region replication
• Global Tables (NEW)
• TTL (NEW)
• Auto Scaling (NEW)
• Strong consistency option
• Atomic counters

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Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Durable, massively scalable object storage
• Designed for 99.999999999% durability and
99.99% availability
• Stores trillions of objects and regularly handles millions of
requests per second
• Effectively infinite storage without provisioning capacity

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Tying it all together
Your Skill
Lambda Function
(request handler)
S3 Bucket
(asset storage)
DynamoDB Table
(state storage)
Polly
(text to speech)
SES Emails
(map, journal info)

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Demo
Alexa
Enabled
Device
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
IAM
Alexa, ask Boaz when is
the next session?
Trigger Lambda
Function
Load
Permissions
Query DB

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Demo
Alexa
Enabled
Device
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
IAM
Next session for Boaz Ziniman is:
Building Alexa Skills with AWS - AWS
Israel Floor28 on October 22 at 11:30 in
Tel Aviv
Format and send
response

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How it works?

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Additional Services
SQS
IoT Rekognition
CloudWatch Kinesis
Interact with a “thing”
Delayed processing
Image analysis
Transform requests/responses
API Gateway
Lambda S3 Athena QuickSight
+ + + + + = Analyze Skill Logs
Polly
Text to speech

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Apply Now alexa.design/AWScredits
A W S P R O M O T I O N A L C R E D I T S
• $100 in credits when you publish your first skill
• Additional $100/month if your skill incurs AWS usage charges

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alexa.design/cookbook
alexa.design/labs-local
github.com/alexa Main Alexa Repository
Lots of sample code!
Great first tutorial to get familiar with Alexa
alexa.design/awspromo Publish a skill, get AWS credits!
alexa.design/devrewards Publish a *great* skill, earn money!
alexa.design/nodesdk Main repo for the ASK NodeJS SDK
Resources

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Thank You!
Boaz Ziniman
Technical Evangelist, Amazon Web Service
Give me feedback – Talk to my Bot
m.me/boaz.ziniman.aws
@ziniman
boaz.ziniman.aws

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GAME DAY
PUT YOUR SKILLS TO THE TEST
OCT 24
Register now: bit.ly/Floor28GameDay