Human Conversations
Take a look at the script to the right. If you are recommending a movie to a friend, you may have a dialog that looks like this. Before you can make a good recommendation, you may ask for your friend’s preferences (movie vs. tv? what decade? which genre?) and confirm them.
As humans, we engage in this type of conversation with each other everyday — booking flights, ordering pizza, reserving a table — going back and forth with questions and answers.
Dialog Management
While creating an Alexa skill, this is the kind of experience we should be aspiring to — engaging conversations with our users. In this lesson we will be using the Dialog Management feature of the Alexa Skills Kit to design those conversations. By the end of this course you will be able to prompt the user for input (slot elicitation), confirm input from the user (slot confirmation), and finally confirm the intent (intent confirmation). You’ll also learn the conversational design concepts behind these tools to make flexible and accessible skills.
This course assumes you are comfortable making Alexa Skills with the Alexa Developer Console and AWS Lambda. If you’re not, start with our Learn Alexa course and come back when you’re ready!
Instructions
Read through the conversation on the right. We will be using it as a guideline throughout this lesson.
A text version of the conversation is available here.
If you’re new to Alexa skills, we recommend you start with the first course in the Alexa series, Build Your First Skill.