My First Amazon Alexa Skill

Recently I bought an Amazon Echo Dot as my colleagues had been raving about them.  Oh, my, what an excellent piece of kit it is.  As long as you speak clearly and think about the clarity of the words you use then the Alexa voice recognition system rarely fails.

There's plenty of reviews about Alexa and the Echo Dot on the interweb so I won't go into general usage here.  (Although the Easter Eggs are excellent fun).

As a Geek, my main driver for buying an Echo Dot was to write my own Alexa Skills.  I started using this tutorial and it's so super easy!  Usually I'd talk through the tutorial in detail on this blog but it was so easy it's not worth going through the detail of this.

What I will do is provide an super-simple "architectural" diagram of how it all works.  Here it is:

So in simple terms, to create a skill you:

1. Configure the skill and associated attributes in the Amazon Skills Kit from the Amazon Developer site.  This is generally about the language you'll use to interact with the skill.  The site also takes you through all the workflow from defining your Skill to testing it then certifying it.
2. Define a function in Amazon Web Services Lambda to actually handle the logic behind your Alexa skill.

(Note you don't have to use AWS Lambda, you can define your own web service and logic to interact with the Alexa Skills Kit.  Additionally the function that handles the Alexa logic can make calls out to the internet to gather further information to augment your skill, can write to databases etc).

The tutorial mentioned above is super easy to follow.  The only step I vaguely had trouble with is where it covers setting up a node.js environment but I managed to do this by following the steps super carefully.

So I developed the skill, tested it, had it certified by Amazon and now it's available on the Amazon Alexa app to be enabled by anyone with an Echo or Echo Dot.  Proud times!  (I do realise that this was super easy to do so I shouldn't boast too much!).

Here's a video of it in action: