Alexa is the speech and personal assistant technology behind Amazon Echo. Today you can use Alexa to listen to music, play games, check traffic and weather, control your household devices such as Philips Hue and Belkin WeMo, and lots more. Alexa offers a full-featured set of APIs and SDKs that you can use to teach her new skills and add her into devices and applications of your own. In this talk, intended for software and hardware developers interested in voice control, home automation, and personal assistant technology, we will walk through the development of a new Alexa skill and incorporate it into a consumer-facing device.

1. © 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Dave Isbitski
October 2015
MBL301
Voice-Enable All the Things:
Creating Voice Experiences Using Amazon
Alexa

2. 2
http://developer.amazon.com/ask
http://developer.amazon.com/blog

3. What is Amazon Echo?

4. Alexa, Hello.

7. Amazon Alexa app

9. Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Overview

10. ALEXA SKILLS KIT (ASK)
https://developer.amazon.com/ask

11. ALEXA VOICE SERVICE (AVS)
https://developer.amazon.com/avs

12. THE ALEXA FUND
https://developer.amazon.com/alexafund

13. Creating your own
ALEXA SKILLS
Alexa skills have two parts:
Configuration data in Amazon
Developer Portal
Hosted service responding to user
requests

14. Alexa architecture
Amazon
Alexa
ServiceGUI cards are
rendered in the
Amazon Alexa app
User audio is streamed
to the service
Audio responses
are rendered on
device

15. Alexa Skills Kit architecture
Amazon
Alexa
Service
Developer’s
Application
Service
Amazon’s
Developer
Portal
Application, intents, sample data,
developer service URL endpoint
Configured through portal
User intents and
arguments are sent
to the developer
service
GUI cards are rendered in
the Amazon Alexa app
User audio is
streamed to the
service
Audio responses are
rendered on device
Text response and/or GUI
card data is returned

16. Sample interactions of
ALEXA SKILLS
One and done
“Alexa, start Astrology and get the Pisces
horoscope.”
[Horoscope Provided]
Conversation
“Alexa, start Astrology”
[“What’s your sign?”]
“Pisces”
[Horoscope Provided]

17. Demo
Configuring a new Alexa skill

18. Building an Alexa skill
HOSTED SERVICE
• Adheres to ASK service interface
• Uses HTTP over SSL/TLS on port 443
• Must be Internet-accessible
• Presents a trusted certificate matching
domain name
– Can use self-signed certificate for
development
– Trusted certificate required for
certification

19. Building an Alexa skill
HOSTED SERVICE
• You define interactions for your voice
app through intent schemas
• Each intent consists of two fields. The
intent field gives the name of the intent.
The slots field lists the slots associated
with that intent.
• Slots can also included types such as
LITERAL, NUMBER, DATE, etc.

20. Building an Alexa skill
HOSTED SERVICE
• The mappings between intents and the
typical utterances that invoke those
intents are provided in a tab-separated
text document of sample utterances.
• Each possible phrase is assigned to one
of the defined intents.
• GetHoroscope what is the horoscope for
{pisces|Sign}
• GetHoroscope what will the horoscope for
{leo|Sign} be {next tuesday|Date}

21. Amazon Alexa service
WILL POST EVENTS
LaunchRequest
Maps to onLaunch() and occurs when the
users launch the app without specifying what
they want
IntentRequest
Maps to onIntent() and occurs when the
user specifies an intent
SessionEndedRequest
Maps to OnSessionEnded() and occurs
when the user ends the session

22. Alexa Service
Examining JSON requests from

24. Handling Amazon Alexa service
requests
• You will need to handle POST requests
to your service over port 443 and parse
the JSON
• You need to check the session variable to
see if the user started a new session or if
request is from existing one
• Requests always include a type, requestId,
and timestamp
• requestId maps directly to LaunchRequest,
IntentRequest, and SessionEndedRequest

25. Testing your skill
service simulator
• Enabled once a skill has been
configured in the developer portal
• Use spoken utterances to generate
ad-hoc results
• Use JSON to verify requests
• Combine with AWS Lambda unit
tests to verify both client and service
side Alexa end points

27. Demo
Alexa Skill – JavaScript and Node JS

28. Thank you!
Drawing winners announced:
http://bit.ly/appstoregiveaway

29. Remember to complete
your evaluations!