The Amazon Echo, with it's voice assitant Alexa, is a surprisingly amazing tool. Having the power of voice recognition tied to the web ready at any time is quite powerful and now that Amazon has opened up a developer platform it's even more exciting!
Amazon has supplied packages for Java and Node.js (tied to the AWS Lamda platform) but I wanted to develop my skills in Go. As I moved through the process making my app work with Amazon's spec, a simple web framework that took care all the heavy lifting on security and crafting the response object formed. I'm looking forward to more Go-based tools getting created and living in this go-alexa bucket but for now the skillserver is the first tool.
Mike Flynn gave a talk about this library an conversational applications in general at the 2016 Strange Loop Conference: "Exploring Conversational Interfaces with Amazon Alexa and Go"
skillserver- A framework to quickly create a skill web service that handles all of the Amazon requirements.- Example: Jeopardy
- An Amazon Echo request simulator
- A library for Alexa responses
Mike Flynn (@thatmikeflynn)