Build Your First Alexa Skill
Lesson 1 of 1
  1. 1
    What is Alexa?
    You may have heard of Amazon Echo, the voice-enabled speaker from Amazon that allows you to get things done, by using your voice. The brain behind Echo and other Amazon voice-enabled devices li…
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  2. 2
    Building an Alexa Skill
    All skills, like web or mobile applications, contain two parts: Interaction Model (the frontend) and the Hosted Service (the backend). * Interaction Model (frontend) — Much like the gra…
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  3. 3
    Interacting with an Alexa Skill
    As we saw in the previous exercise, to begin a conversation with Alexa-Enabled devices, like the Amazon Echo, you say the word “Alexa”, followed by the request, like: _Alexa, ask History Buff w…
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  4. 4
    Intents & Utterances
    Let’s say we want to create a Codecademy skill that will do just one thing — respond with a “Hello, Codecademy” message. — #### Intents Before we get into designing the frontend and the b…
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  5. 5
    Alexa Developer Console
    We are now ready to create our first Alexa skill. The first thing we will do is create the interaction model, also called the Voice User Interface (VUI) for our skill. We will do that using the Al…
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  6. 6
    Create Skill
    To start building a skill, click on the Create Skill button in the top right corner. This will bring you to the “Create a new Alexa Skill” wizard. We will walk through this wizard step by step….
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  7. 7
    Create the Interaction Model
    In Exercise 4, you came up with unique utterances that map to your skill’s “HelloIntent”. Some of your utterances may include “hello”, “how are you”, “howdy”, and “what’s up”. It’s time to put you…
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  8. 8
    Connect Lambda Function
    Now that we have created the interaction model (the frontend), it’s time to connect that to our programming logic (the backend). For this course, we will be using AWS Lambda functions to host…
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  9. 9
    Connect Lambda Function II
    Let’s connect the frontend to a Lambda function (the backend) using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). 1. Copy this ARN: arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:776991280512:function:codecademyLearnAlexaIntro-ii …
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  10. 10
    Test Simulator
    The interactive test simulator on the right will help us understand the process of requests and responses. 1. In the text box labeled Enter an utterance, type “tell {YOUR-FIRST-NAME} {LAST-INI…
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  11. 11
    Service Simulator II
    As you continue to learn about Alexa Skills Development, being able to access the contents of a skill’s requests and responses will help you troubleshoot bugs. Amazon provides developers a way to…
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  12. 12
    Review
    Nice work, you just built and tested your first Alexa Skill! Let’s review the main topics from this lesson: - Alexa is the cloud based service that handles all the speech recognition, machine lea…
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What you'll create

Portfolio projects that showcase your new skills

How you'll master it

Stress-test your knowledge with quizzes that help commit syntax to memory