Learn how to develop voice-based serverless back ends for Alexa Voice Service (AVS) and Alexa devices using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), which allows you to add new voice-based interactions to Alexa. We’ll code a new skill, implemented by a serverless backend leveraging AWS services such as AWS Lambda.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
January 2017
Creating IoT Solutions with
Serverless Architecture & Alexa
John Chang (張書源)
Technology Evangelist
johnchan@amazon.com

2. Today’s agenda
• Skill building fundamentals
• Voice User-Interface
• Alexa skill building

3. 70s 80s 90s 00s Present
mode
GUI
web
mobile
character
VUI

6. Skill Building Fundamentals
Before we code
1. developer.amazon.com
2. aws.amazon.com

7. 7
The Alexa Service
Alexa
Skills
Kit
Alexa
Voice
Services
© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

8. 8
Alexa Skills Kit: Processing a request
© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Audio
Request
Response
Your
service
Speech Recognition
Machine Learning
Natural Language Understanding
Text to Speech
Cards

9. 9© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Cards
Alexa Skills Kit: Utterances and Intents
Response
Your
service
Audio
Speech Recognition
Machine Learning
Natural Language Understanding
Text to Speech
Request
Intents
Utterances

10. ASR – Automatic Speech
Recognition
fȯr tē tīmz
• Forty Times?
• For Tea Times?
• For Tee Times?
• Four Tee Times?

11. Alexa, ask Anime Facts for a fact
wake word utteranceskill namelaunch
Utterances and Intents

12. One more please
utterance
Utterances and Intents
Alexa, ask Anime Facts for a fact
wake word utteranceskill namelaunch

13. GetFactIntent
Intent
utterance slot value
Utterances and Intents
One more please
utterance
Alexa, ask Anime Facts for a fact
wake word utteranceskill namelaunch

14. 14
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.

15. 15
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}

16. 16© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Audio
Speech Recognition
Machine Learning
Natural Language Understanding
Text to Speech
Cards
Alexa Skills Kit: Requests and Responses
Request
Response
Your
service

17. 17

18. 18
Handling Amazon Alexa service
Requests
• You 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

19. 19
Alexa Skills Kit: Request and Response
© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
“Help”

20. 20
Using Lambda for Processing the
Request & generating the response
© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

21. 21
Demo
© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

22. AnswerIntent {value: “one”}
slot valueIntent
one is the answer
slot value
Slots in the utterances
The answer is one
slot value
one
slot value

23. 23
Utterances and Intent Schema
Utterances Intent Schema

24. 24
Utterances and Intent Schema
Utterances Intent Schema

25. 25
Built-in and Custom Slot Types

26. 26
Session Attributes
© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

27. 27
Session Persistence
© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
exports.handler = function (event, context, callback) {
var alexa = Alexa.handler(event, context);
alexa.appId = appId;
alexa.dynamoDBTableName = 'YourTableName'; // That's it!
alexa.registerHandlers(State1Handlers, State2Handlers);
alexa.execute();
};
this.attributes['yourAttribute'] = 'value';
var yourVariable = this.attributes['yourAttribute']
Add dynamoDB
table name in
your index.js
put
get

28. Thank you!