Skillex

• Write Alexa skills through human-readable configuration.
• Easily handle many complex states within a skill.

Getting Started

npm install -g skillex

This tool is designed to be used with the Ask CLI.

Ask CLI: npm install -g ask-cli

It's also recommended you use Bespoken Tools for developing your skill without having to frequently redeploy to see your changes.

Bespoken Tools: npm install -g bespoken-tools

Core Concepts

A skill is configured almost entirely through YAML files referred to as "scenes". An entire skill can be represented in a single scene, or multiple scenes can be used to represent groups of states(e.g. different "scenes" in a text adventure game). entrypoint.yml is always the default scene.

Each scene contains one or more "labels", which are merely the top-level objects in a scene. Labels represent a very specific scene in the execution of a skill, and can contain various key/value pairs used to build a skill response.

For example, a label can have a say: key that defines the speech text that is returned to an Alexa-enabled device. If you want to ask the user a question and wait for a response, you would define that with a ask:.

Tutorial

Let's make a new skill.

skillex new my-skill

In my-skill/scene/entrypoint.yml, you'll see the following:

Intro:
  speak: Congratulations!  You've successuflly run your first skill.

Before we continue, build your schema by running skillex build-model. This will write a JSON file to the build/alexa/models directory.

Assuming you have set up the Ask CLI with the proper credentials, you can deploy your skill by running:

skillex deploy

Which is the equivalent of running

skillex bundle
ask deploy

If the deploy is successful, your skill should now be available on an Alexa-enabled device associatd with your Amazon developer account. Just say "Alexa, open my skill" and see what happens, or use the new test simulator.

Tests

Testing uses Mocha, and is pretty much a joke at the moment.

npm install -g mocha

Run tests with the mocha command in the root project folder.

Current State

I'm working on a serious rewrite. Will add more documentation soon as things stabilize.

TODO

• go to scene: complete
• go to random:
• condition: complete enough
• card: complete
• assign: w/ operators complete
• template strings complete
• script: complete
• template keys complete
• audio: complete
• linter/warning system to catch errors & pitfalls
• reprompt: complete
• full support of multi-language strings complete
• session persistence
• video:
• utterance expander complete
• intent wildcard complete
• automatic mapping of simpler intent names to AMAZON intent names complete
• automagically guess built-in slot types based on slot names complete
• encrypted attributes
• simple slot value extraction complete
• your utterances are also your intents & samples complete
• require slots:
• templates and the Display directive
• prompts:
• Random speech strings to easily provide converstional variance complete

License

See LICENSE.txt.