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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Amazon Echo is a smart speaker developed by Amazon, which connects to Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service and is entirely controlled by voice commands. Amazon Echo is currently being used for a variety of purposes such as home automation, asking generic queries, and even ordering a cab or pizza.
Alexa Skills Projects starts with a basic introduction to Amazon Alexa and Echo. You will then deep dive into Alexa Programming
concepts such as Intents, Slots, Lambdas and maintaining your skill’s state using DynamoDB. You will get a clear understanding of how some of the most popular Alexa Skills work, and gain experience of working with real-world Amazon Echo applications. In the concluding chapters, you will explore the future of voice-enabled applications and their coverage with respect to the Internet of Things.
By the end of the book, you will have learned to design Alexa Skills for specific purposes and interact with Amazon Echo to execute these skills.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 163
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Alexa Skills Projects
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing
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Commissioning Editor: Gebin GeorgeAcquisition Editor:Divya PoojariContent Development Editor:Eisha DsouzaTechnical Editor:Sneha HanchateCopy Editor:SafisProject Coordinator:Shweta H BirwatkarProofreader: Safis EditingIndexer:Rekha NairGraphics:Jisha ChirayilProduction Coordinator: Nilesh Mohite
First published: June 2016
Production reference: 1290618
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78899-725-6
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Contributors
About the author
Madhur Bhargava is specialized in Wireless and Mobile Computing from CDAC ACTS Pune, India. He started his career at Electronic Arts as a software engineer working on mobile games. He later addressed problems in personalized healthcare, leveraging the power of mobile and voice computing. He is proficient in various mobile/embedded technologies and strives to be a software generalist. He believes that good software is a result of talented individuals working together as a communicative team in an Agile manner. He likes to spend time with his family, read, and watch movies.
About the reviewer
Srini Janarthanam is an expert in Chatbots, NLP and AI technologies with over 10 years of experience. He got his Ph.D. from The University of Edinburgh. He worked as a researcher at Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt Universities where he worked on several research projects and authored over 50 conference/journal publications. He runs a chatbot and AI solutions agency - Chatomate. He recently authored the book Hands On - Chatbots and Conversational UI Development published by Packt.
Packt is searching for authors like you
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Alexa Skills Projects
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Why subscribe?
PacktPub.com
Contributors
About the author
About the reviewer
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
What is Alexa?
The Need for Voice-Based Personal Assistants
Applications of Voice-Based Personal Assistants
Siri
Google Now
Cortana
Alexa
A Comparison of Various Voice-Based Personal Assistants
Summary
Hello World, Alexa!
An Introduction to Amazon Echo
Amazon Echo – First Generation
Amazon Echo – Second Generation
Anatomy of an Alexa Skill
Invocation Name
Intents and Slots
Lambda
Hello Alexa – Building a Hello World Alexa Skill
Summary
Hands-Free Experience with Alexa
Overview of the Handsfree Messenger Skill
Configuring the Twilio Messaging Backend
Configuring the Handsfree Messenger Skill
Coding the Lambda function
Testing the Skill
Summary
Let's Play Factly with Alexa
Motivation for Designing Factly
Designing the Factly Skill
Building the Factly Skill
Configuring the Lambda function
Coding the Lambda function
Adding Persistence to Factly
Updating the Factly Lambda Code to Introduce Persistence
Testing the skill
Summary
Making Alexa Talk About CryptoCurrencies
A Brief Introduction to Cryptocurrencies
Designing the CryptoOracle skill
Building the CryptoOracle skill
Configuring the Lambda function
Coding the Lambda function
Testing the skill
Summary
Home Automation with Alexa
Introduction to Home Automation and Ambient Sensors
Designing the Ambience Manager Skill
Developing the Mobile App
Setting up Firebase
Developing the Ambience Manager Skill
Configuring the Lambda function
Coding the Lambda function
Testing and debugging the Skill
Summary
The Future of Voice-Based Personal Assistants
Popular Alexa Skills
Games and Trivia
News
Music and Audio
Education and Reference
Lifestyle
Comparing Various Voice-Based Assistants
Amazon Echo
Google Home
Apple HomePod
Future of Voice-Based Assistants
Summary
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Preface
The advent of voice computing in recent years has caused a tectonic shift, with the result being that interactive voice-based personal assistants no longer lurk in the shadows, and Amazon Alexa, Siri, and Google Now have become common household names. Apart from their traditional abodes of mobile devices, these assistants can also be found in the center of our living and dining rooms in the form of Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod devices.
This book focuses on harnessing the power of voice computing by studying Alexa, which is the interactive voice-based personal assistant used in Amazon Echo. Over the course of this book, we will embark on a journey to understand the internals of Alexa and how it works under the hood, while creating five unique Alexa Skills, each of which will be designed to address a specific purpose and a real-world use case.
I hope you enjoy the journey!
Who this book is for
This book is aimed at everyone who is interested in learning about the underlying voice computing technology on which Amazon Echo and Alexa are based, and also learning how we can leverage that technology to create skills for Alexa oriented towards home automation, the Internet of Things, and various other domains.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, What Is Alexa?, is an introductory chapter that does not require any coding skills. We discuss how intelligent voice-activated personal assistants are evolving from just being passively present in mobile phones to becoming a permanent fixture in common households in the form of dedicated hardware devices.
Chapter 2, Hello World, Alexa!, will introduce the reader to the process of creating skills for Alexa and will explain how to create a basic Hello World Alexa skill.
Chapter 3, Hands-Free Experience with Alexa, will introduce a new way of sending messages using Alexa, that is, the hands-free way.
Chapter 4, Let’s Play Factly with Alexa, will create a game called Factly as an Alexa skill. We will also add persistence to it using DynamoDB.
Chapter 5, Making Alexa Talk about CryptoCurrencies, will demonstrate how Alexa can provide the latest cryptocurrency updates. The user will create an Alexa skill that can fetch the current prices of the latest cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Chapter 6, Home Automation with Alexa, will demonstrate how Alexa can integrate with other IoT devices and create the foundation of a smart home. The user will create a Weather Monitor Alexa skill that can inform the user about the climate (temperature/humidity/light) in the home.
Chapter 7, Future of Voice-Based Personal Assistants, will talk about the future of the intelligent voice-based personal assistants.
To get the most out of this book
The following are the prerequisites to get the most out of this book:
Basic familiarity with a modern programming language such as JavaScript. All of the code that we'll write for the Lambdas is based on Node.js.
Free Tier Amazon AWS Developer account.
Basic familiarity with code editors.
Not mandatory, but recommended is an Amazon Alexa-enabled device, such as an Amazon Echo.
Over the course of this book, we will be making many configuration changes via the Amazon Developer Portal. We recommend that you follow these steps as described, so a good Internet connection is highly recommended.
Download the example code files
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What is Alexa?
For our human ancestors, as their brains evolved, so did their language, from signs and sounds to a more sophisticated form of oral speech, which made them capable of having complex conversations to form the social ties required for their survival. Unlike written communication, oral speech leaves no traces of its own, hence it was hard for historians to calculate an exact date for the origin of speech. However, using various methods, historians have speculated that speech was developed 300,000 years ago, symbols 30,000 and writing 7,000 years ago. Ever since then, humans have been putting speech and voice to various creative uses.
In this chapter, we shall explore one such use of our voice, the ability to command interactive voice-based personal assistants to perform specific tasks at will. Also before that, we will also understand what an intelligent voice-based personal assistant is, what needs it fulfills, and what voice-based personal assistants are available (including Alexa) in the current market by going through the following topics:
The Need for Voice-Based Personal Assistants
Applications of Voice-Based Personal Assistants
A Comparison of Various Voice-Based Personal Assistants
So, let's move on to our first topic.
The Need for Voice-Based Personal Assistants
To understand the evolution of voice-based personal assistants, we will have to go back in time and see some of the important events that led to their advent. One of these many events was the evolution of computers. Although not directly related to the voice revolution, the evolution of computers played a key role in the evolution of voice-based personal assistants because it marked the invention of the internet, which is the backbone of most voice-based personal assistants. The computer revolution also introduced critical changes concerning hardware and integrated circuits, which we shall discuss next.
The computer revolution began in the 19th century when Charles Babbage invented the first analytical engine, which earned him the nickname the Father of Computers. The 1950s and 1960s were interesting times, which introduced some tremendous advances in the field of computer science with a groundbreaking invention, integrated circuits. Integrated circuits replaced diodes and vacuum tubes, which led to tremendous form factor changes in existing computers, in turn leading to smaller, more compact sizes. It was also the time when Gordon Moore introduced his famous observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years; roughly speaking, we would be able to pack more and more processing power into an integrated circuit while the size of the circuit would shrink every two years. Moore's observation already foresaw the future of our technology and hardware, and by following it we could have easily predicted at least one thing, that we would be seeing our computers getting smaller, a lot smaller, and voilà, today nearly everyone has a small computer in his/her hands, their smartphone.
The late '60s and early '70s also saw the advent of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which eventually evolved to become the internet as we came to know it in the '80s. All this sounds trivial at first, before you realize that all these were the key factors that, had they not been invented, we would have never seen voice-based personal assistants in action.
Prior to voice-based personal assistants, the traditional way of sending commands to a computer system was either through the GUI using a mouse or through the terminal using a keyboard. As the form factor of traditional computing systems reduced, the input methods evolved too and initial handheld devices/mobile phones introduced a stylus in addition to the traditional keyboard to leverage the touchscreen capabilities of the device:
The evolution continued and the place of the stylus was taken by, as pointed out by Steve Jobs,"the best pointing device in the world," our fingers.
As the interface between computers and humans grew thinner, it was only natural that voice was the next medium that could act as an input tool to computing devices, and hence there has been the advent of voice-based personal assistants.
Of the many milestones of the voice revolution, almost every reader will be familiar with at least a few of the latest ones, namely Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa. The most popular ones are Apple's Siri and Google's Google Now, which initially appeared integrated with iOS and Android mobile devices, respectively.
Apple's Siri initially appeared as an app on Apple's App Store, but was later acquired by Apple and became much more closely integrated with iOS devices. Siri uses a natural language interface to listen to commands from the user and perform the necessary actions. Also, with the coming of macOS Sierra, its capabilities were no longer limited to iOS devices:
