Alexa Skill

POC to learn more about how to build alexa skills.

• Live API
• Test you request using Postman

How to Use

Once you've installed this skill, you can say:

Alexa, inicie o Santa Cruz Notícias

How it Works

The idea is to know the latest news regarding Santa Cruz soccer team. This repo contains three different layers and each one is explained below.

intents

This is the first layer of the skill. In this file you're going to find the available keywords to trigger the skill.

The action GetFactIntent will accept these values as valid entries: ultimas noticias, novidades or ultimas novidades.

api

This is the second layer of the skill. Built using Fastify, it is responsible for start a nodejs server, fetch the content and then return a JSON with the following structure:

In order to fetch the latest news regarding the soccer team, we exposed /news endpoint.

{
	"path": "news",
	"payload": {
		"content": "Here is the news formatted to speech.",
        "contentMapped": [{ "date": "02/09", "text": "Here is the news title" }],
		"length": 1
	}
}

lambda

This is the third layer of the skill. Built using Alexa-hosted (Node.js), it is responsible for communicating with the API and speaking the data.

The method GetFactIntentHandler was created to handle the intent (GetFactIntent) of the first layer.

const GetFactIntentHandler = {
    canHandle(handlerInput) {
        return Alexa.getRequestType(handlerInput.requestEnvelope) === 'IntentRequest'
            && Alexa.getIntentName(handlerInput.requestEnvelope) === 'GetFactIntent';
    },
    async handle(handlerInput) {        
        const response = await httpGet(); // request to external API
        const speakOutput = response.payload.content; // speak here

        return handlerInput.responseBuilder
            .speak(speakOutput)
            .getResponse();
    }
};

Setup

In order to communicate with the API layer using a hosted skill, you need to publish the API in a public domain. All files from lambda path can be replaced by the files in your web console, and the files under intents path, can be replaced by the file in intents web section.

intents

This file will be used for intents web section.

• access your aws developer console
• click to edit your skill
• click on "Build" tab

api

In order to make it running on your local environment, move to the api path and run:

To install all the dependencies:

$ npm install

To start a development server under http://localhost:3000:

$ npm run start

ngrok

An easy way to test your local API, interacting with the amazon hosted services is to expose a public tunnel using ngrok.

heroku

Here are some useful commands:

$ heroku logs --tail --app=<app-name>

$ heroku buildpacks --app=<app-name>

$ heroku apps:info --app=<app-name>

lambda

This file will be used for code editor web section.

• access your aws developer console
• click to edit your skill
• click on "Code" tab

Resources

• https://www.sitepoint.com/amazon-alexa-skill/
• https://developer.amazon.com/alexa/console/ask
• https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/alexa-design/get-started.html
• https://ngrok.com/

License

MIT License © Thulio Philipe