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

Building the chatbot

With all of the sub-flow diagrams and the master flow diagram, we can start to build the chatbot. Another great thing about having these sub-flows is that they are quite similar to intents.

Before we can start creating intents, we need to set up our Lex bot. In the Lex console, click Create and then follow the process for creating a Custom bot as described in Chapter 5, Building Your First Amazon Lex Chatbot.

Product find

We will start with the most common conversation—finding a product. First, we'll create a new intent called productFind.

This intent will deal with users who want to find a product to add to their cart, as well as users just checking the stock levels, so we need to provide...