Applying Our Learnings: Alexa Skills Kit

Abstract

One of book's goals is to emphasize that the ideas, techniques, and skills introduced throughout apply to many types of applications. In this chapter, by creating a simple Alexa skill, we demonstrate how we can apply our knowledge of intent classification, entity extraction, and dialog construction to create a natural language voice experience. We begin by creating an Alexa skill in the simplest way possible, by using the Alexa Skills Kit SDK for Node.js. Since we already have a bot service back end, you may inevitably ask whether we can integrate Alexa with this back end. The answer is a resounding yes. Once we have our Alexa skill basics down, we will show how to power an Alexa skill via Direct Line and a Bot Framework bot.