Amazon Alexa Skill Development
“Alexa, how do I program skills for you?”
“Alexa, how do I program skills for you?”
At the time I write this intro snippet for Alexa Skill Development, calendar Q1 2017 is past its halfway mark. I wish there was something more poetic to say, but voice search and digital assistants are taking the digital marketing and search landscape by storm. For my part, learning Amazon Alexa Skill development is an important next step to both understanding the consumer behavior and technology shifts in play. Please follow along with my journey and get in touch with questions or comments.
The start of my shared journey into becoming a better Amazon Alexa skill developer.
Getting started with Alexa skill development by setting up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account.
Getting started with Alexa skill development by setting up an account for the Alexa Developer Portal. (Slightly different from the previous AWS setup, and necessary to proceed.)
Note: this is an optional section. It’s also extremely technical, but informative. We walk through the process of hardware collection, AWS setup and software installation, leading to having a fully functional Amazon Alexa, DIY-style.
After walking through snow, uphill both ways and doing battle with too much command line, we completed the DIY Alexa Raspberry Pi. This quick post walks through the testing and validation process, with a happy ending!
We take a lot of baby steps in this article, primarily AWS set up and configuration. It’s not sexy, but contains the necessary steps for us to start playing with invocation, utterance samples and so forth. An essential read!
In this article, we get a bit more hands on with the configurations pertaining to voice search. Here, we specify a(n) (simple) interaction model, specify intent schemas, provide sample utterances and lay some other key foundations in submitting our Alexa skill for certification.
It’s time to level up! In this article, we start building out an interactive Alexa quiz skill based on the popular reindeerGames example. Stay tuned as we only do the AWS Lambda function setup here.