DIY an Alexa hello World skill in 5 steps

Alexa, what is Alexa?

You probably have heard of Apple's Siri or Google Home. Then you can make a good guess what's Amazon Alexa.

Alexa is a cloud-based personal voice assistant released by Amazon in November 2014. It was first used in Amazon Echo. Most devices with Alexa are always on and ready to take your wake voice command, i.e. "Alexa".

If you have heard enough about Alexa and want to jump straight to the tutorial, click this. Otherwise, we will try our best to give you a short introduction so you can appreciate why Alexa is being created.

Why the name Alexa?

What can Alexa do?

• Home Automation
• Food Ordering
• Online Purchase
• Music/Video streaming
• News and weather broadcasting
• Sports updates
• Messaging and calls (with Alexa contacts)
• Business (conference calls, meeting schedule and etc)
• Productivity (To-do and shopping lists)

How many Alexa skills are there in the marketplace now?

According to a report by TechCrunch on Jul 3, 2017, Amazon's Alexa voice platform has passed 15,000 skills, up from 7,000 skills at the beginning of the year. The doubling of the number of skills that were available shows that Alexa is growing healthily.

We foresee that Amazon Echo as one of the Internet Of Things (IoT) that stole the shows at CES will continue to increase its presence in the market.

Let's get started with the app tutorial.

What are we trying to achieve?

You will need an active AWS developer account to follow the tutorial. Without further ado, let's jump in and learn how to write an Alexa Skill.

Tutorial Step 1: Alexa Dashboard

Then click on "Add New Skill" on the right. As a side note, you can see on this page that Amazon is actively trying to get more developers onboard by giving monetary rewards for the most engaging skills.

Tutorial Step 2: Create new Alexa Skill

Click Save, then "Next".

On the "Interaction Model" page, click "Launch Skill Builder".

We are now ready to define our intent. Intent lets Alexa understands what user desires to do. You can think of intent as the button on the website. When a button is pressed, the website will process the user request.

Let's name the intent as "HelloIntent" then press "Create Intent".

Next, we will define the sample utterances. Sample utterances define the phrases users might say to invoke this intent. In this example, we added three sample utterances: hi, hello, and howdy. Click the "Save Model" button at the top, then click the "Build Model" to build the intent. Once completed, click on the "Configuration" button next to the "Interaction Model".

At this point, we will switch AWS lambda to define the functionality of HelloIntent.

Tutorial Step 3: Create Lambda Node.js Function

There are a number of Alexa Lambda Blueprint template ready to be used. These templates make use of the external "alexa-sdk" library that going to make our life easier and the code cleaner to maintain. Let do a search on "alexa" and pick "alexa-skill-kit-sdk-factskill" template. 

Give the function a name and set the Role as "Choose an existing role" and existing role input as "lambda_basic_execution".  Click "Create Function". Click the "Create Function" button at the end of the page.

We will add the "Alexa Skill Kit" trigger to this lambda function. Click on the "Alexa Skill Kit" under the "Add triggers" list. Remember to click the orange "save" button. Without adding and saving the trigger, the Lambda function will not be able to understand Alexa request gave wrong response.

Click on the Lambda Icon with label "HelloITWonders" in the middle to switch back to Lambda code editor view.

'use strict';

const Alexa = require('alexa-sdk');

const handlers = {
    'LaunchRequest': function () {
        this.emit('SayHello');
    },
    'HelloIntent': function () {
        this.emit('SayHello');
    },
    'SayHello': function() {
        this.response.speak("Hello, Awesome");
        this.emit(':responseReady');
    },
    'Unhandled': function() {
        this.response.speak("Sorry, I have not programmed to understand this yet");
        this.emit(':responseReady');
    }
};

exports.handler = function (event, context) {
    const alexa = Alexa.handler(event, context);
    alexa.registerHandlers(handlers);
    alexa.execute();
};

Tutorial Step 4: Test the Function

Select the test event created just now and you should see the success test log. Take note of the Summary Duration and "Max memory used". AWS offers 1 million free Lambda requests per month. Depending on the memory you configured, if it's 128MB, you can run it 3,200,000 seconds per month for free.

Before proceeding, you need to copy down the ARN endpoint. For this example it is "arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:xxxxxxxxxx:function:HelloITWonders".

Tutorial Step 5: Complete the Skill

Remember to enable the test by clicking on the switch.

Let's simulate the test. Key in "howdy" in the utterance input and click "Ask hello IT Wonders". Hola, we got the output "Hello, Awesome"!

Congratulations!

What's Next?

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