Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex

By : Williams

2 (1)

Buy this Book

Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex

2 (1)

By: Williams

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Have you ever wondered how Alexa apps are made, how voice-enabled technologies work, or how chatbots function? And why tech giants such as Amazon and Google are investing in voice technologies? A better question is: why should I start developing on these platforms? Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex covers all features of the Alexa Skills kit with real-world examples that help you develop skills to integrate Echo and chatbots into Facebook, Slack, and Twilio with the Amazon Lex platform. The book starts with teaching you how to set up your local environment and AWS CLI so that you can automate the process of uploading AWS Lambda from your local machine. You will then learn to develop Alexa Skills and Lex chatbots using Lambda functions to control functionality. Once you’ve come to grips with this, you will learn to create increasingly complex chatbots, integrate Amazon S3, and change the way Alexa talks to the user. In the concluding chapters, we shift our focus to Amazon Lex and messaging chatbots. We will explore Alexa, learn about DynamoDB databases, and add cards to user conversations. By the end of this book, you will have explored a full set of technologies that will enable you to create your own voice and messaging chatbots using Amazon.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Get in touch

Free Chapter

Understanding Chatbots

What are chatbots?

What makes up a chatbot?

Designing conversation flows

Best practices

Amazon Alexa and Lex

Summary

Questions

Getting Started with AWS and Amazon CLI

Technical requirements

Creating an account

Creating a Lambda

Methods for working with Lambdas

Creating the best local development environment

Summary

Questions

Creating Your First Alexa Skill

Technical requirements

Alexa Skills Kit

Creating a Lambda to handle the request

Testing your skills

Creating a more useful skill

Conversational flow diagram

Creating the Lambda

Launching your skill

Summary

Questions

Creating a Lambda

AWS Lambda functions are incredible! They’re functions that are hosted on AWS that can be triggered in many different ways. Lambda functions are serverless, which means that you don't need to run a server to use them. This makes it a lot quicker and easier to set up and use.

One of the best parts of AWS Lambdas is that you only pay for the time the Lambda function is running. Got something that only runs once an hour and only takes two seconds? You’ll only be charged for 48 seconds a day! That’s insane compared to running a 24/7 AWS EC2 server or your own private server.

Today, we’ll create a Lambda function and look at the three best ways to work with the code.

Once you’ve got your AWS account set up, there are a few ways to create a new Lambda function. We’re going to start by using the AWS Console.

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