We moved on from learning about the details of Echo and Alexa to designing a basic Alexa Skill. We also gained some familiarity with the anatomy of a basic Alexa Skill and how the various moving parts in a skill interact with each other.

In this chapter, we take our design skills a little further and create a slightly more advanced skill. Our skill is called Handsfree Messenger and it will allow the user to leverage Alexa to send SMSes in a hands-free manner, just using Alexa and Echo, without any interaction with his/her phone. We will use a custom service called Twilio, which allows a user/developer to make/receive phone calls programmatically and send/receive text messages using web service APIs, in addition to AWS, where we will be hosting our Lambda.

We...