This document is a step-by-step guide on creating custom skills for Amazon Alexa, covering topics such as interaction models, skill types, and development procedures. It discusses various Alexa skills like smart home control, video skills, and flash briefings, highlighting their capabilities and requirements. Additionally, it outlines the process to design a voice user interface, set up a skill in the developer console, write and test the code, beta test the skill, and submit it for certification.

1. September 15
Building Amazon Alexa Custom
skill Step by step
Learn how to create custom skill for Amazon
Alexa and dive into the world of digital
assistants

2. About Speaker
• Stamo Petkov
• Information services Plc.
• Head of Microsoft Technologies
department
• Contact
o s.g.petkov@is-bg.net
o stamo.petkov@gmail.com
o https://github.com/stamo
o http://bg.linkedin.com/in/stamopetkov
o https://www.facebook.com/stamo.petkov
o @stamo_petkov

3. Thanks to our Sponsors
Innovation Partner
With the Support of:
Trusted PartnerDigital Transformation Partner

4. Agenda
o What is Alexa and do we care about digital assistants
at all
o Alexa Skills and the Alexa Skills Kit
• ASK
• Skills and Skill models
• Intents and Utterances
o Building custom skill
o Demo

5. What is Alexa?
And do we care about digital assistants at all?

6. Do we care about digital assistants at all?
InfographicbyGo-Gulf

7. Do we care about digital assistants at all?
InfographicbyGo-Gulf

8. Do we care about digital assistants at all?

9. Alexa Skills and the Alexa
Skills Kit
ASK, Skills, Skill models, Intents and Utterances

10. Alexa Skills and the Alexa Skills Kit
• Alexa provides a set of built-in capabilities, referred to
as skills
o playing music from multiple providers
o answering questions
o providing weather forecasts
o querying Wikipedia
• The Alexa Skills Kit lets you teach Alexa new skills
o order pizza from Domino's Pizza
o get you a car from Uber
o play Avengers: Infinity War Trivia Game
o turn on lights in living room
o even Cortana can be an Alexa Skill

11. But, be careful with Siri or Despacito!

12. Skill models
• Every skill has an interaction
model that determines the
requests the skill can handle and
the words users say to invoke
those requests
• You can define it yourself with a
custom model
• The Alexa Skills Kit also provides
pre-built models in which the
possible requests and utterances
are pre-defined for you
• Pre-built interaction
model
• Smart Home Skill
• Video Skill
• Flash Briefing Skill
• List Skill
• Custom interaction
model
• Custom skill

13. Pre-built Models
• give you less control over the user's experience
• simplifies development since you do not need to create
the voice user interface yourself
• easier for end users to invoke
• can respond only to the requests (device directives)
supported by the corresponding API
• you (as the developer) define how your skill responds to
a particular directive

14. Smart Home Skill
• control smart home devices
such as cameras, lights, locks,
thermostats, and smart TVs
• device directives
o turn on / turn off
o increase / decrease the temperature
o change the dimness or brightness for a light
o lock / unlock a door
o change the channel on a television
o increase / decrease volume
o view a live video stream from a smart home
camera on Echo Show or Fire TV

15. Video Skill
• designed to enable customers to easily find and
consume video content
• Alexa is aware of video devices and services a user has or
subscribes to, and enables the user to control
experiences across these devices and services
• device directives
o searching and playing content
o playback controls such as pause and rewind
o launching an app or GUI shortcut
o recording video content
o channel navigation
o video catalog ingestion

16. Flash Briefing Skill
• provides a quick overview of news and other content
such as comedy, interviews, and list
• Alexa either reads text content or plays audio content
that is provided by each enabled skill
• becomes a part of a customer's daily routine as they get
ready for work or school
• content should update at least once a day
• you use the developer portal to provide the name, image
and other descriptive information that display in the
skills list, as well as configure the feeds that populate a
Flash Briefing skill with content

17. List Skills
• list skill is created through the ASK CLI (Alexa Skills Kit
Command Line Interface)
• list skill may include an optional custom component,
which can include any features allowed for custom skills,
in addition to list skill features
• device directives
o Adding an item to a list
o Removing an item from a list
o Updating an item on a list

18. Custom skill
• for the most control over the user's experience, build a
skill with a custom interaction model
• developer defines
o the requests the skill can handle. These are defined as intents
o the words users say to make (or invoke) those requests. This is the interaction
model, and it provides the voice user interface by which users communicate with
the skill
o the visual and touch interactions that users will experience and can invoke
o the name Alexa uses to identify your skill, called the invocation name
• this is the most flexible kind of skill you can build, but
also the most complex, since you need to provide the
interaction model

19. Building custom skill
Step by step

20. Steps to Build a Custom Skill
• design a Voice User Interface
• set up the Skill in the
Developer Console
• use the Voice Design to build
your Interaction Model
• write and test the code for
your Skill
• beta test your Skill (Optional)
• submit your skill for
Certification

21. Design a Voice User Interface
• designing an effective voice user interface for your skill is
a critical first step that you should do before writing any
code
• create a flow diagram that maps out how users will
interact with the skill
• use the flow diagram to identify the user requests that
your skill will handle. These will become intents
• if your skill is designed to include images, gather that
content and store them on a publicly accessible site

22. Set up the Skill in the Developer Console
To create a new skill, you need to provide:
• a name that identifies the skill. When you publish the
skill, this becomes the public name that customers will
see in the skill store. You can edit this name before you
publish if necessary.
• the initial language to use. You can add support for
additional languages later.
• the interaction model that defines how users interact
with your skill.

23. Use the Voice Design to build your
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

24. Write and test the code for your Skill
• create a service that can accept requests from the Alexa
service and send back responses
• you can create an AWS Lambda function to host the
service for your skill or build a web service and host it
with any cloud provider
• write the code for your skill. If you are using Lambda, you
can code in Node.js, Java, Python, or C#. If you are
hosting your skill as a web service, you can use any
programming language
• test your skill with the Test page or an Alexa-enabled
device

25. Beta test your Skill
• Once your skill is finished,
you have the option of
setting up a beta test for
your skill. With a beta test,
you can make your skill
available to a limited group
of testers that you have
personally selected, rather
than to the general public

26. Submit your skill for Certification
when you are ready to make your skill public, submit it for
certification. If your skill is currently in a beta test, you can
still proceed with certification
• run the validation and functional tests on the
Certification page in the developer console
• review the submission checklist
• when you are ready for your skill to be made public, and
you have ensured that your skill fulfills the requirements
on the certification checklist, submit your skill for
certification

28. Onion Omega 2 Expansion Dock
Relay Expansion
Amazon Echo Dot
For the Demo we will
use

31. Thanks to our Sponsors
Innovation Partner
With the Support of:
Trusted PartnerDigital Transformation Partner

32. Upcoming Events
SQLSaturday #763 (Sofia), October 13
http://www.sqlsaturday.com/763/
JS Talks (Sofia), November 17
http://jstalks.net/
Global O365 Developer
Bootcamp, October 27
http://aka.ms/O365DevBootcamp