Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant … voice assistants are in fashion and have come to stay. With them it is possible to do many actions that a few years ago seemed like science fiction: controlling the lights of the house, listening to our favorite music, knowing the weather tomorrow,… controlling everything with our voice! In this talk we will talk about Amazon Echo and Alexa. You will learn how easy it is to develop new skills and deploy them to AWS Lambda without spending a euro. I’ll bring an Echo Dot to the talk to show you the fun things you can do with it. I’m pretty sure that after this talk you can’t wait to have one!

1. Alexa, nice to meet you
Iván López
@ilopmar

2. ▷ Iván López Martín - @ilopmar
▷ Java/Groovy developer
Grails & Micronaut teams
at OCI
▷ @MadridGUG coordinator
http://madridgug.com
▷ Greach ex-organizer
http://greachconf.com
▷ Speaker: Devoxx, GeeCon, Codemotion, ConFoo,
JavaCro, RigaDev Days, Spring IO, SpringOne 2GX,...
About me...

4. Disclaimer

5. Security

7. Alexa, can you play
dollhouse with me and
get me a dollhouse?
“

9. I love the little girl saying:
“Alexa ordered me a
dollhouse”
“

11. What you can do
with Alexa?

12. What you can do with Alexa?
- Play music
- Weather information
- News
- Calculations
- Alarms, timer
- Calendar
- Tasks lists and shopping list
- Traffic status
- More...

13. Why with the
voice?

14. Add TO DO
1. Find the phone
2. Unlock it
3. Find and open the application
4. Find the list and tap on “Add
item”
5. Type the task and tap on
“Done”
6. Exit the application
7. Put away phone

15. 1. Alexa, add “book flight” to my
todo list
1. Find the phone
2. Unlock it
3. Find and open the application
4. Find the list and tap on “Add
item”
5. Type the task and tap on
“Done”
6. Exit the application
7. Put away phone
Add TO DO

16. Turn off the LIGHT
1. Find the phone
2. Unlock it
3. Find and open the application
4. Find and select the right
room/bulb
5. “Tap” to turn it off
6. Exit the application
7. Put away phone

17. Turn off the LIGHT
1. Find the phone
2. Unlock it
3. Find and open the application
4. Find and select the right
room/bulb
5. “Tap” to turn it off
6. Exit the application
7. Put away phone
1. Alexa, turn off the lamp

18. Meet the Alexa family

19. What is Alexa?
The cloud-based voice service that powers devices
like the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot

20. How does Alexa work?
Voice json
json
Voice
Voice
CardCard
Voice

21. The Amazon Alexa service
Alexa Skills Kit
(ASK)
ASR: Automatic Speech Recognition
NLU: Natural Language Understanding
TTS: Text-to-Speech
Alexa Voice Service
(AVS)

22. The Amazon Alexa service
Alexa Skills Kit
(ASK)
ASR, NLU & TTS
Alexa Voice Service
(AVS)

23. Creating an Alexa skill
Voice User Interface
(VUI)
Programming
Logic

24. Creating an Alexa skill
developer.amazon.com aws.amazon.com
or hosted service
Voice User Interface
(VUI)
Programming
Logic

25. Creating an Alexa skill

26. Alexa, open Chuck Norris facts
Wake word Skill invocation nameStarting phrase
Speach recognition

27. Alexa, ask Chuck Norris facts for a fact
Speach recognition
Wake word Skill invocation nameStarting phrase Utterance

28. How it works
The key is the NLU (Naturable Language Understanding)
and the model we use to train it

29. {
"name": "FactIntent",
"slots": [],
"samples": [
"give me a fact",
"say a fact",
"tell me a fact",
"a fact",
"give me a Chuck Norris fact",
"say a Chuck Norris fact",
"tell me a Chuck Norris fact",
"a Chuck Norris fact"
]
}
Sample utterances
Sentences to
train the model
Skill “behavior”

30. Show me the
code!

31. Summary
- It’s easy develop and deploy skills
- Certification process is a real pain
- A voice interface doesn’t change our lives...
- ...but it helps to make things easier
- New market, time to grow up and evolve
- Cheap devices

32. Thanks!
Questions?
http://bit.ly/alexa-bucharest
@ilopmar
lopez.ivan@gmail.com
https://github.com/ilopmar
Iván López