Whistle Life

Serverless Framework Alexa Lambda for Whistle. Made for the Smart Cities Hackathon @CES2017

How it works

In the Alexa Developer Portal you can add your own skill. To do so you need to define the available intents and then connect them to a Lambda. You can update and define the Lambda with Serverless.

Setup

In order to deploy the endpoint simply update the following placeholders in the code:

- defconSettings for each Defcon level (for dev only. The real skill uses a database and account management for preference settings)
- Tropo tokens for both the voice and the text version of the messaging service
- Firebase URL to store conversations

Once that's done, run this in the terminal:

serverless deploy

The expected result should be similar to:

Serverless: Packaging service...
Serverless: Uploading CloudFormation file to S3...
Serverless: Uploading service .zip file to S3 (378 B)...
Serverless: Updating Stack...
Serverless: Checking Stack update progress...
.........
Serverless: Stack update finished...
Serverless: Removing old service versions...
Service Information
service: aws-node-alexa-skill-2
stage: dev
region: us-east-1
api keys:
  None
endpoints:
  None
functions:
  aws-node-alexa-skill-2-dev-whistle: arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:377024778620:function:aws-node-alexa-skill-2-dev-whistle

Next we need to setup an Alexa skill. Once you've signed up for the Amazon Developer Platform visit https://developer.amazon.com/edw/home.html. There you should see the following screen:

Next click on Add a new Skill:

Go through the steps and fill in all the required fields e.g. Intent Schema and Sample Utterances:

Intent Schema

{
  "intents": [
    {
      "intent": "whistle",
      "slots": [
        {
          "name": "defconLevel",
          "type": "AMAZON.NUMBER"
        },
        {
          "name": "defconCustomMessage",
          "type" : "AMAZON.US_STATE"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

NOTE: We are using US_STATE as the slot type as the more (or not?) meaningful "AMAZON.LITERAL" is going away Feb 2017.

Sample Utterances

whistle alert
whistle notify
whistle defcon {defconLevel}
whistle defcon level {defconLevel}
whistle {defconLevel}
whistle {defconLevel} that {defconCustomMessage}
whistle {defconLevel} {defconCustomMessage}
whistle defcon {defconLevel} that {defconCustomMessage}

The skill also replies back via custom SMS or Voice call. This is set up in Tropo. The current assigned number is: (650) 532-9782

Fill in the Lambda ARN which was printed or run serverless info to retrieve the ARN again.

Next up visit the test page, fill in the utterance and click on Ask whistle button.

Check out this Amazon guide to learn more about how to submit your skill for publication.