Custom Alexa skills allow developers to create skills that handle a wide variety of requests beyond the standard skills for smart home, video, music, and flash briefings. Custom skills have components like intents, utterances, an invocation name, and a cloud service endpoint. The interaction model defines the intents, sample utterances, and dialog model. Intents represent the requests a skill can handle and optionally have argument slots. A dialog model identifies the information a skill requires and prompts Alexa can use to collect it through a multi-turn conversation. Developers build custom skills by setting them up in the developer console, building the interaction model, coding and deploying an AWS Lambda endpoint service, optionally testing in beta, and submitting for certification.

1. Custom Alexa Skills
by: Deepansh Sachdeva

2. Voice Assistants are COOL... but NOT EVERY TIME

3. Types of Skills
➔ Custom Skills
➔ Smart Home Skills
➔ Video Skills
➔ Flash Briefing Skills
➔ Music Skills

4. Custom Skills
➔ A skill that can handle just about any type of request. Just about anything else
you can think of from interactive games to integrating web services.
➔ Components of custom skills
◆ Intent: actions that users can do with your skill.
◆ Utterances: words and phrases users can say to invoke those intents.
◆ Invocation Name: used to identify the skill and start the conversation.
◆ Cloud Service: endpoint that handles the intent requests.

5. User-Skill Communication

6. Steps to Build a Custom Skill
➔ Setup skill in developer console
➔ Build interaction model
➔ Code & Deploy your endpoint service (AWS Lambda recommended)
➔ Beta testing (optional)
➔ Submit for certification

7. Interaction Model
➔ The interaction model refers to your collection of intents, sample utterances,
and the dialog model.
➔ The requests your skill can handle are represented as intents.
➔ Intents can optionally have arguments called slots.
➔ Sample utterances map the intents to the words and phrases users can say to
interact with your skill.
➔ A dialog model identifies information your skill requires and the prompts Alexa
can use to collect and confirm that information in a conversation with the user.

8. Intents & Slots
➔ Intents can be custom with specified utterances or amazon provides few
built-in intents.
➔ Each intent required at least one sample utterance.
➔ Intents have slots to capture data from speech. It can also be custom and
built-in.
➔ Dialog model can be used for multi turn conversation.

9. Dialog Model for Multi Turn Conversation
➔ A dialog model identifies the prompts and user utterances to collect, validate,
and confirm slot values and intents.
➔ Determines the next step in conversation & ask the user for more information.
➔ Components of dialog model:
◆ Required slots & prompts
◆ Slot confirmation prompts
◆ Intent confirmation prompts
◆ Slot validations & prompts
➔ Intent requests provides dialog state which can be STARTED, IN_PROGRESS
or COMPLETED.

10. Endpoint (AWS Lambda)
➔ The ASK SDK for Node.js is available for easy implementation of lambda for
Alexa skills.
➔ Process intent requests.
➔ Defines intent handlers.
➔ Builds speech responses & directives.
➔ Manages session & persistent attributes.
➔ Alexa service APIs.