Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Second Run in With Alexa

After completing the Alexa skill yesterday I tackled another today. This time the skill that I taught her was a trivia skill. I very much enjoyed the show 30 Rock when it was on the air; something about the show’s writing and how quickly another joke would be told was fantastic. I don’t think I mentioned how someone goes about creating an Alexa skill in the last post, so I’ll give myself the chance to do it in this blog post. The route I’m taking to make an Alexa skill is by creating a Lambda function with Amazon. The Lambda function is where all the code for the Alexa skill lives. You have invocations on how to activate the skill, you have all the back end functions that will make Alexa respond the way that you want, and finally you have all the answers that Alexa will utter when the skill is activated. After you create the Lambda function you go on to create the Alexa skill in Amazon’s developer portal. In the developer portal you give Amazon all the information about the skill you’re developing and you can test it out to make sure that Alexa says the words correctly and if not you have that chance to correct that inside the code that you wrote.
I think that this was a great experience and the next skill that I make will make me understand how to make these skills even more as I will make one with no template whatsoever. Stay tuned to read about how it goes in a blog post I hope to be up by tomorrow or the day following!

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