With the quickly emerging interest in voice enabled technologies, I decided for my 3rd project of the back-end portion of the Full Stack course would be the Alexa project. This looks to be a very interesting project in that it’s completely different from the rest of the available projects and also from any other project I’ve yet encountered. Voice technologies are not completely new to me, but yet, they are. Talking to Google, or Siri, might be my only interactions with voice, so far, in my life, unless you also count the constant shouting “Xbox ON!” at my TV/Xbox setup…

This project entails making two small apps, or “Skills” as Amazon calls them, based on provided samples from the Alexa team. Followed by 1 custom Skill.

The first step was to learn about the submission process and how Amazon has setup their hosting and accounts for their developers to leverage. This process was not altogether difficult but there are a great number of moving parts. You need an Amazon developer account which is where your submissions go and then you must also use some form of hosting for your code, which they recommend you use their Lambda Service from AWS.

I took their sample template for a Skill called ‘Reindeer Games’ and created a ‘World War Two Trivia’ Skill. This was a simple swap out of code and the main purpose was really to go through the motions so I understood how to create a Skill, some of the code that runs the skill, and what Amazon requires to have the Skill “Certified” and live for other users to ‘enable’.

The steps to launch a voice application are a bit more complicated than traditional apps. As one can imagine, you must define how the user is going to interact with your app, i.e. what are they going to say to it to make it run. Alexa separates this logic from the core code; as everyone will need to have functionality it is a good idea to not have to have that in each developer’s code but instead have it hosted by Alexa and have the developer simply define the “utterances” that users will say. This is the purpose of utilizing the Developer Console and the many many steps to certification.

Amazon’s feedback system inside the Developer portal was good in that I got a feel for what should go into each of the inputs, however, I did struggle with exactly what to put. For instance, the example phrases must match exactly to the sample utterances. During my first submission, my certifier noted where I messed up and recommended fixes; this particular feedback service was excellent and I do hope it continues for more complex custom Skills. The downside to that type of feedback is that it takes at least 24 hours, and up to 7 full days, to have a reviewer check your Skill before certification. That reminds me of the difference between submitting to Apple’s App Store in contrast to Google’s Play Store. I found this unfortunate and probably my biggest complaint thus far; I definitely crave faster feedback.

Either way, I finished that Skill, went through one round of submission feedback, got certified, and now my first Skill is live on Alexa.

Check it out, ‘World War Two Trivia’ by Mustang Designs.

Stay tuned…