I am teaching Alexa its first Kanye Skill

[bdougie]

I am teaching Alexa its first Kanye Skill

The company I work for announced a partnership with Amazon to start teaching or students how to create skills for Alexa.

https://blog.bloc.io/amazon-alexa-developer-training/

I am forever a learner when it comes with programming and I am pretty intrigued to see how hard it was to submit my first skill through the Amazon Developer portal (Spoiler it wasn’t that hard).

The Alexa is the interface for the Amazon Echo, a hands-free speaker you control with your voice. The Alexa Voice Service can play music, provide information, news, sports scores, weather, and more — instantly. I currently do not have or have not used an Alexa in person, but to help support this new partnership I went through the step by step instructions on the alexa-skills-kit-js repo.

The Fact Templates are great guides to get acquainted with the Alexa Skill node script. I simply cloned the repo and started with the Space Geek template.

As I do, I came up with some replacement facts for the space facts provided and they were facts about Kanye.

Did you know one of Kanye is a big fan of Fionna Apple?

Kanye has made a name for himself and as an entertainer/entrepreneur and what better place than the Echo to learn about his accomplishments.

From a quick google search I found 45 facts about Kanye and wrapped them up in a JavaScript Array. I also did some quick find and replacing to name my Kanye skill, “Kanye Knowledge.” Most of my time in developing this skill was spent finding facts about Kanye, working with the JavaScript template was about 10mins of work.

You can view my code here:

https://github.com/bdougie/KanyeSkill/tree/master

The majority of my time was spent trying to traverse the documentation on getting my skill hosted on Amazon Lambda. I missed step 13 of the README, which is the main reason why it took me 40mins to get my code working and tested on Lambda.

#13 Set the Event Source type as Alexa Skills kit and Enable it now. Click Submit.

Once I got my Lambda endpoint url, the Amazon Developer was pretty straight forward. I am told that it can take up to 7 days for my skill to be reviewed, but hopefully my 157 lined index.js isn’t too much trouble.

Now I wait to hear positive news about my skill next week; I have plans to eventually get an Echo in the near future, but until then I hope someone can benefit from my potential skill.

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