On August 22, 2019, I was invited by my Alma Mater - Amrapali Group of Institutes to deliver a guest lecture on the basics of Python and my then ongoing project on Alexa Skill Development for my then employer - Ferns N Petals.

1. Shivam Dutt Sharma
B.Tech (Computer Science &
Engineering)
Batch 2010 - ‘14
Presently,
Deputy Manager (Online Products)

2. My Employers

3. Ferns N Petals
We are India’s largest flower and gifts retailer and one of the largest flower retailers in the world with
a network of 320+ outlets across 120 cities.
Today, Ferns N Petals Group encompasses of :-
❖ FNP Retail & Franchising
❖ FNP E-commerce- India & UAE
❖ FNP Weddings & Events
❖ Floral Touch- India & UAE
❖ FNP Gardens, Flowers ‘N’ More
❖ The Flagship Store by FNP
❖ WDH (Wedding Design Hub)
❖ FNP Cakes 'N' More
❖ FNP Water
❖ FNP Media.
The brand provides solutions for everybody’s floral needs, be it buying flowers for occasions, floral
decor for weddings, parties or just delivering fresh flowers not only in India but across the globe.

4. What do I do @FernsNPetals?
- I am an Online Product Manager in the E-commerce vertical.
- My key responsibility is to manage an in-house product / microservice
called JARVIS. This JARVIS is not Tony Stark's natural-language user interface
computer system J.A.R.V.I.S.
- JARVIS is an in-house CRM / Ticket Management System for
FernsNPetals. It serves the purpose of a conventional standard query
management platform, however, it has some merits of being an in-house
product which makes the product more scalable and its development more
agile.
- JARVIS is apparently the first microservice written on our tech stack. With this
we moved away from a third party legacy CRM software service of Oracle
called RightNow.
- Another interesting and ambitious project : FNP - Alexa Integration

5. What do we pick first?

6. ALEXA SKILL DEVELOPMENT @FNP
Enabling voice orders on our consumer platform
6

7. What?
Alexa : Amazon Alexa which is simply known
as Alexa, is a virtual assistant developed by
Amazon.
Its capabilities : Voice interaction, music
playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms,
streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and
providing weather, traffic, sports, and other real-
time information, such as news.
PROJECT OBJECTIVE : Enable voice orders on Ferns N Petals
through Alexa.
Why?
Ferns N Petals, like majority of the
ecommerce players of its nature and in
similar gifting industry, facilitates the
consumers to place an order either on its
website, m-site or the App. By enabling voice
orders, we will be the first market player in
our industry to do so.
7

8. VOICE : Why is it on the rise?
POTENTIAL
Humans have come to a
realization that how vast
the potential of VUI is.
They are engaging in voice
experiences beyond
customer service and
search.
ACCESSIBILITY
Now, anyone can
leverage the learnings
from fields like
Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR),
Natural Language
Understanding (NLU),
and Text To Speech
(TTS).
RESOURCES
Web Services and the IoT
provide ready-made
opportunities for VUI. For
example, a normal Alexa skill
development requires you to
merely have a Amazon
Developer Console Account
& the AWS services.
8

9. Let’s dive into the,
Alexa world!
Obviously, before you can get on to this interesting ride
with me, it is important for me to
brush up your knowledge on the various aspects and
elements of the Alexa Skill Development
9

10. What is Alexa Skill Kit?
&
What does it take to build
an Alexa Skill, afterall?
10

11. ALEXA SKILLS KIT
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Alexa provides a set of built-in capabilities, referred to as skills. For example, Alexa's abilities include playing
music from multiple providers, answering questions, providing weather forecasts, and querying Wikipedia.
The Alexa Skills Kit lets you teach Alexa new skills. Customers can access these new abilities by asking Alexa
questions or making requests. You can build skills that provide users with many different types of abilities. For
example, a skill might do any one of the following:
● Look up answers to specific questions ("Alexa, ask tide pooler for the high tide today in Seattle.")
● Challenge the user with puzzles or games ("Alexa, play Harry Potter quiz.")
● Control lights and other devices in the home ("Alexa, turn on the living room lights.")
● Provide audio or text content for a customer's flash briefing ("Alexa, give me my flash briefing")

12. What will it take for me to build an Alexa
Skill?
12
- I should have an Amazon Developer Console account.
- I should have an access to AWS Lambda (which is an Amazon Web Services
offering) where I can run my code in the cloud without any servers.
- Alternatively, I can write a web service and host it with any cloud hosting
provider. The web service must accept requests over HTTPS.
- I should have a decent knowledge of any one of the following programming
languages : Node.js, Java, Python, C#, or Go.
- Regardless of how you create your service, the most important part for you is
to create a custom interaction model for the skill. This would basically define
the requests that the skill can handle

13. Alexa Developer Console
13
Use Build to set up your skill,
configure the interaction model &
specify the endpoints for your
interaction model.
Use Text to test your skill with either
text or voice.
Use Distribution to preview how your
skill will appear in the skill store.
Use Certification to validate your
skill, run pre-certification tests, and
then submit the skill for certification
Use Analytics to review metrics for
your skill such as number utterances,
customers, and intents invoked.
“Alexa Developer Console is the
place for you to be creating,
managing and publishing your
skills”

14. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
14

15. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
15
AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides cloud computing platforms to
individuals, companies and other big scale institutions.
- It works on a metered pay-as-you-go-basis.
- The cloud computing services of AWS provide abstract technical infrastructure
and distributed computing building blocks.
- One such application / service of AWS is “AWS Lambda”. That’s
essentially what we are going to look at and explore while I show you a pilot of
an Alexa Custom Skill. But, everything aside, what is actually AWS Lambda?
- AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service provided by AWS. Lambda
inspects actions within the application and responds by deploying user defined
codes called as FUNCTIONS. Lambda supports the code written in Java,
Python and Node.js.

16. Alexa Skill Building
16
INVOCATION NAME - Users say a skill's invocation name to begin an interaction with a particular custom
skill. For example, if the invocation name is "Daily Horoscopes", users can say:
User: Alexa, ask Daily Horoscopes for the horoscope for Gemini
INTENTS - An intent represents an action that fulfills a user's spoken request.
UTTERANCES - The sample utterances are set of likely spoken phrases mapped to the intents.
SLOTS - Intents can optionally have arguments called slots.

17. Let the bots do the thinking!
17

18. Language Preference : Python
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Why Python?
1) Simple to learn, read & write.
2) Free & Open Source - Python is an example of free / libre and
open source software FLOSS, which means one can easily
distribute copies of this software, read its source code,
modify it, etc.
3) It is a High level Language - one does not need to bother
about low level details like memory allocation while writing
Python script.
4) It is cross platform. A program written in an operating
system can be run in a different operating system without
any modifications.
5) It supports procedure as well as object oriented
programming paradigm.
6) It is extensible.

19. 19

20. Applications of Python
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- Web Development
- Testing
- Computer Vision
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Intelligence
- Deep Learning
- NAtural Language Processing

21. Python Basics / Fundamentals :-
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Comments : Comment is an additional text in the program to increase
its readability. A comment starts with ‘#’ and extends till end of the
line. The comments don’t get executed.
Literal Constants : Any number or character or set of characters.
Identifiers : A Python identifier is a name used to identify a variable,
function, class, module or other objects. There is case insensitivity in
Python programming language. No special characters such as @, $,
and % within identifiers. Can start with Letter A to Z or a to z or an
underscore followed by zero or more letters, underscores and digits.
They also have some naming conventions, wherein a class must
always start with an uppercase letter, starting the identifier with a
single leading underscore makes it private, etc.

22. Variables
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Variables : are nothing but reserved memory locations to store values. This
means that when you create a variable, you reserve some space in memory.
A = 15
B = 30
C = ‘Shivam’
Print (A, B, C)
Out[] : 15 30 Shivam
Standard Data Types :-
Immutable - Numbers, Strings & Tuples
Mutable - Lists, Dictionaries, Sets

23. Numbers Data Types - Immutable Data Type
23
Python supports three different numerical values :-
- int (signed integers)
- Complex Numbers
- Float (Real Numbers)
In Python, you can represent Numbers in multiple ways :-
- Binary
- Octal
- Hexadecimal
A = 10 #thisisinteger
B = 10.65 #thisisfloat
C = 10 + 6j #thisiscomplex
print(A, B, C)
Out[] : 10 10.65 (10 + 6j)

24. Strings - Immutable Data Type
24
- Sequence of characters represented in quotes is known as
strings.
- Python does not support character type; they are treated as
strings of length one.
- Python strings can be defined within a pair of single or double
quotes. It can also be defined within triple single or double
quotes.
A = ‘I am in Amrapali’ #thisisstring
B = “I am in Amrapali” #thisisstring
C = ‘’’I am in Amrapali’’’ #thisisstring
print(A)
Out[] : I am in Amrapali I am in Amrapali I am in Amrapali

25. Some textbooks for reference :-
25
How to think like a Computer Scientist? - Green Tea Press
Fundamentals of Python Programming - Rick Halterman
A Python Book - Dave Kuhlman
Youtube videos - Edureka

26. Let’s skip the language basics and get to libraries..
26
Pandas : Pandas is a software library for Data manipulation and
analysis.
NumPy : NumPy is a package for scientific computing.
Features - Multi Dimensional Array, Methods for processing arrays,
Mathematical operations like linear algebra, etc.
matplotlib : Matplotlib is a multi-platform data visualization library
built on NumPy arrays.

27. NumPy
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Import numpy as np
a = np.array([1, 2, 3, 4])
print (a)
Creating a single dimensional array :-
Creating a multi dimensional array :-
Import numpy as np
a = np.array([[1, 2, 3, 4], [5,6,7,8]])
print (a)

28. Pandas
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Converting a list into Data Frame
import pandas
listx = [10, 20, 30, 40]
Table = pandas.DataFrame(listx)
print(table)
Reading data from csv file
table = pandas.read_csv(“filepath.csv”)
print(table)
Writing to a file
df1 = pd.DataFrame([['a', 'b'], ['c', 'd']],
index=['row 1', 'row 2'],
columns=['col 1', 'col 2'])
df1.to_excel("output.xlsx") # doctest:
+SKIP

29. matlplotlib
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Plotting a graph
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
df = pd.read_csv("/data/training/sales.csv")
x = np.arange(1949, 1960, 0.01)
plt.plot([1520,1676,2042,2364,2700,2867,340
8,3939,4421,4572,5140,5714])
plt.xlabel('Year')
plt.ylabel('Sales')