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Building an Interactive Alexa Quiz Skill, Part 2

Disclaimer: this was typed late at night on a tired mind. Please excuse typos, convention errors, and generally poor writing. 🙂 Howdy, Alexa nerds! Welcome back to our journey in learning Amazon Alexa Skill Development. Quick funny aside, would you care to guess my most common use of the Echo? It’s to play looong Spotify […]

DSC_0002 Zach Doty Cover Photo for Interactive Alexa Quiz Skill Development

Building an Interactive Quiz Alexa Skill, Part 1

Hello Alexa geeks! Welcome back to our journey of learning how to develop Amazon Alexa Skills for the Echo and more. Last time, we completed the build process for our first simple “fact-dispensing” Alexa Skill. In this article, we’ll start the process for a skill that accepts user input in the form of a quiz, […]

How to Build Your First Amazon Alexa Skill, Pt. 2: Skill Interface

Welcome back, Alexa geeks! In the last article, we laid the groundwork for making our first Amazon Alexa skill. We covered the concepts and frameworks in Alexa skill development. We also did some work in AWS Lambda to prepare for voice requests  being made to our service.   Quick Recap on The Alexa Skill Service […]

How to Build Your First Amazon Alexa Skill, Part 1 – The Skill Service

Introductory Disclaimer: AWS is changing, and changing fast! Between developing my first skill in mid-January 2017 and now going back to learn more / teach, quite a lot has changed in the AWS developer areas. All that to say is that I’ve already had to cobble screen shots together to make this article work, and […]

Update: Testing Your DIY Amazon Alexa / Echo Device (Raspberry Pi)

Hey there folks, happy weekend! Hope this post finds you well. This is a follow up to my previous post on how to make your own Amazon Alexa / Echo device from a Raspberry Pi. First, an Apology for the Cliff Hanger I left you hanging at the end of that post, and I’m very […]

DSC_0005 Cover Photo by Zach Doty for Build Your Own Amazon Alexa x Echo from Raspberry Pi

How to Build Your Own Amazon Alexa with a Raspberry Pi

Howdy, it’s been a minute since my last post on Alexa Skill Development. I left us hanging, as I mentioned in one of my previous SQL posts, work craziness, sickness, and general life stuff happening imposed a brief, involuntary hiatus on writing. Enough self talk to make future self feel better. Let’s build our own […]

Getting Started with Alexa Development 02: Signing Up to Alexa Development Portal

Welcome back to our journey in learning how to program Amazon Alexa Skills via Echo voice search. In the previous article, we walked through the process of setting up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. Today, we’ll set up an account at the Alexa Development portal, a distinct entity from the AWS portal.   Without […]

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Getting Started with Amazon Alexa Development: Signing Up To Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Welcome back, folks, to our foray into Amazon Alexa Skill Development. If you’ve visited the blog recently, you’ll notice I’ve been juggling a few subjects for a minute, including SQL. For context, here’s our first article, starting Amazon Alexa skill development from the absolute beginning. (Following my haphazard skill development of Silly Marketing Strategies at […]

The Absolute Beginning for Amazon Alexa Voice Skill Development

An Introduction to this Alexa Learning Journey So if you’ve visited my site at all in the past, you’ll notice this is the most blogging I’ve done in…ever? Put another way, a significant confluence of factors has dialed up my motivation to doggedly pursue learning and growth. So, here we are at learning Alexa skills! […]