please meet amazon alexa and the alexa skills kit

A M A Z O N A L E X A A N D T H E A L E X A S K I L L S K I TBe ready for your customers whenever they ASK for you

D E A N B RY E N @ d e a n b r y e n d e a n @ a m a z o n . c o m

A G E N D A

Meet Alexa and Echo

Why Voice

The Alexa Skills Kit

VUI Best Practices

The Alexa Fund

Questions

M E E T E C H O A N D A L E X A

We also recently launched Fire TV with Alexa integrated directly into the device.

Simplifying everyday actions with voice on new and familiar devices.

& FIRE TVMEET ECHO

The First AlexaEndpoints

The Echo is the first and best-known endpoint of the Alexa Ecosystem…The Echo was built to make lifeeasier and more enjoyable.

We’ve received over 36,000 customer reviews in the first 12 months alone. Ratings clock in at 4.5 stars. And there has been no shortage of love…

“Amazon’s Echo might be the most important

product in years”

“I admit, I may have said ‘I love you’ to Alexa on

more than one occasion”

“The real genius of the Amazon Echo isn't simply

what it can do now, but what it might lead to…”

Accoladesroll in…

A Perfect 10

WHAT ARE PEOPLE SAYING?

Create Great Content: ASK is how you connect

to your consumer

THE ALEXA ECOSYSTEMSupported by two powerful frameworks

A L E X A V O I C E

S E RV I C E

Unparalleled Distribution: AVS allows your content

to be everywhereLives In The Cloud

Automated Speech Recognition (ASR)

Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

Always Learning

A L E X A S K I L L S

K I T

Register a device

View and manage actions

Link third-party accounts

View lists

Enable skills

And much more

T H E A L E X A C O M PA N I O N A P P

W H Y V O I C E I S I M P O RTA N T TO Y O U

C O N V E R S AT I O N I S T H E M O S T N AT U R A L WAY TO E N G A G E W I T H Y O U R P R O D U C T S

V O I C E R E L E A S E S T H E F R I C T I O N O F T R A D I T I O N A L T E C H N O L O G Y I N T E R A C T I O N

U S E R S C A N N O W I N T E R A C T W I T H Y O U R P R O D U C T I N A M O R E I N T I M AT E WAY

V O I C E W I L L B E E V E RY W H E R E

T H E A L E X A S K I L L S K I Th t t p s : / / d e v e l o p e r. a m a z o n . c o m / a s k

UNDER THE HOOD OF ASKA closer look at how the Alexa Skills Kit process a request and returns an appropriate response

You Pass Back a Textual or Audio Response

You Pass Back a Graphical Response

Alexa Identifies Skill & Recognizes Intent Through ASR & NLU

Alexa SendsCustomer IntentTo Your Service

Your ServiceProcessesRequest

User Makes a Request

Audio Stream IsSent Up To Alexa

Respond to Intent Through Text & VisualAlexa Converts Text-to-Speech

Renders Graphical Component

Amazon Alexa

Service

Developer’s Application

Service

Amazon’s Developer

Portal

A L E X A S K I L L S K I T A R C H I T E C T U R E

Amazon Alexa

Service


Service


PortalApplication, intents, sample data, developer service URL endpoint

Configured through portal


Amazon Alexa

Service


Service




User audio is streamed to the service


Amazon Alexa

Service


Service




User intents and arguments are sent to the developer service

User audio is streamed to the service


Amazon Alexa

Service


Service




Text response and/or GUI card data is returned


Amazon Alexa

Service


Service




Audio responses are rendered on device



Amazon Alexa

Service


Service




GUI cards are rendered in the

Amazon Alexa app

Audio responses are rendered on device



H O S T I N G Y O U R S K I L L S

Skills live in the cloud, and are hosted in one of two places:

AWS Lambda

or

An internet accessible HTTPS endpoint with a trusted certificate

I N T E N T S A N D S L O T S

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. intent schemas are uploaded to your skill in the Amazon Developer Portal

{ "intents": [ { "intent": "tflinfo", "slots": [ { "name": "LINENAME", "type": "LINENAMES" } ] } ]}

C U S TO M S L O T S

Custom Slots increase the accuracy of Alexa when identifying an argument within an intent.

They are created as a line separated list of values

It is recommended to have as many possible slots as possible. There are some built in slots for things such as US.State and US.FirstName

bakerloocentralcircledistricthammersmith and cityjubileemetropolitannorthernpiccadillyvictoriawaterloo and citylondon overgroundtfl railDLR

S A M P L E U T T E R A N C E S

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. tflinfo are there any disruptions on the {LINENAME} line

tflinfo {LINENAME} line

“What is…”“Are there…”“Tell me…”“Give me…”“Give…”“Find…”“Find me…”

R E Q U E S T T Y P E S

LaunchRequest Maps to onLaunch() and occurs when the users launch the app without specifying what they want

IntentRequest Maps to onIntent() and occurs when the user specifies an intent

SessionEndedRequest Maps to OnSessionEnded() and occurs when the user ends the session

A N E X A M P L E R E Q U E S T

If hosting your own service, you will need to handle POST requests to your service over port 443 and parse the JSON

With AWS Lambda, the event object that is passed when invoking your function is equal to the request JSON

Requests always include a type, requestId, and timestamp

If an IntentRequest they will include the intent and its slots

type maps directly to LaunchRequest, IntentRequest, and SessionEndedRequest

"request": { "type": "IntentRequest", "requestId": "string", "timestamp":"2016-05-13T13:19:25Z", "intent": { "name": "tflinfo", "slots": { "LINENAME": { "name": "LINENAME", "value": "circle" } } }, "locale": "en-US" }

A N E X A M P L E R E S P O N S E

Your app will need to build a response object that includes the relevant keys and values.

The Amazon Developer Portal has plenty of examples to get started.

There are some third party helper products for node.js such as alexa-app who have simplified this even more.

outputSpeech, card and reprompt are the supported response objects.

shouldEndSession is a boolean value that determines wether the conversation is complete or not

You can also store session data in the Alexa Voice Service. These are in the sessionAttributes object.

{ "version": "1.0", "response": { "outputSpeech": { "type": "SSML", "ssml": "<speak>There are

currently no delays on the circle line.</speak>"

}, "shouldEndSession": true }, "sessionAttributes": {}}

S K I L L C O D E / D E M O

V U I B E S T P R A C T I C E S

WHERE DO WE START?The Evolution of a Skill

Traffic Skill ExampleGiveanestimatedtimeofarrivalfromhometowork

Traffic Skill ExampleIncludecrashes,construction

andclosuresonroute

Traffic Skill ExampleHand-offfromEchotoinmobileturn-by-turndirectionswithlocalsearchandrecommendations.

R U NEvolve Over Time

C R AW LWhat’s Your Core functionality?

ANALYZE USER FEEDBACK& OPTIMIZE SKILL

WA L KExpand Capabilities & Features

INNOVATE FOR CUSTOMERS

V U I P R I N C I P L E S

CRAWL, WALK, RUN Don’t overwhelm your users with features out of the box. This is a new medium of interaction with your product. Keep it simple and grow from there.

NATURAL AS POSSIBLE Try to make your utterances as natural as they possibly can.

SUPPORT MULTIPLE UTTERANCES Create as many utterances as possible to upload to the portal. There is an awesome open source project called alexa-utterances that is great at helping you to do this.

UTILISE THE BUILT IN HELP INTENT There is an intent called the helpIntent that is invoked for common requests for help such as “help me” you can handle this in your skill and respond with useful speech.

S O M E D O ’s & D O N T ’s o f V U I

DONT I can give you disruption information for the London Underground

DO I can give you disruption information for the London Underground. Tell me the line you would like to check.




DONT Welcome to TFL

DO Welcome to the TFL skill. You can get disruption information by saying a London Underground line name




DONT Welcome to TFL


DONT I can give disruption info for all of the London Underground lines. Which one would you like….

DO Which line would you like disruption information for?




DONT Welcome to TFL


DONT I can give disruption info for all of the London Underground lines. Which one would you like….

DO Which line would you like disruption information for?

DONT You would like disruption information for the circle line right?

DO There are currently no delays on the circle line

THE PLANHigh-Level Framework to help get you started

We’ve put together a plan to take your projects from inception to launch through a honed process that includes multiple touch-points with the Alexa team.

1

V O I C E E X P E R I E N C E D E S I G NEstablishStrategic&CreativeDirection

What’sYourMVP?DevelopUserFlows&Scripts

PrepareUtterances&Responses

D E V E L O P M E N TBringtheSkilltoLife

InitialSkillSubmissionDeliverSkilltoAmazonForReview

2

T R A I N I N G & C E RT I F I C AT I O NAmazon&DeveloperTesting&Adjustments

Certification&Deployment

3

Start

End

T H E A L E X A F U N D

T h e A l e x a F u n d i s a $ 1 0 0 M s t r a t e g i c f u n d . D e s i g n e d t o s u p p o r t t h e A l e x a e c o s y s t e m

1 4 i n v e s t m e n t s t o d a t e H a r d w a r e t h a t b e n e f i t s f r o m A l e x a ’s v o i c e i n t e r f a c e

E x p e r i e n c e s t h a t D e l i v e r n e w A l e x a c a p a b i l i t i e s

N e w c o n t r i b u t i o n s t o t h e v o i c e t e c h n o l o g y

Q U E S T I O N S ?A S K

D E A N B RY E N @ d e a n b r y e n d e a n @ a m a z o n . c o m

please meet amazon alexa and the alexa skills kit

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