alexa-bridge

A bridge between Alexa Skills and the Microsoft Bot SDK

Overview

This is a simple restify-based server that acts as a bridge between an Alexa Skill and a Microsoft Bot Framework bot. Utterances originating at an Alexa endpoint e.g. an Echo device are received by this bridge, translated and forwarded to the Microsoft Bot. Replies coming back from the Bot are then returned to the originating endpoint. Alexa will read out the text in the Text field of the Bot reply.

HowTo

Set up an Alexa Skill

First you'll need an Alexa skill. Set this up to be a Custom skill with whatever Invocation Name you prefer.

Next, configure the interaction model exactly like this:

{
  "intents": [
    {
      "intent": "GetUserIntent",
       "slots": [
        {
          "name": "phrase",
          "type": "phrase"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
} 

Next add a single custom slot type named 'phrase'. Type anything you like for the value. It literally doesn't matter.

Finally provide a single sample utterance:

GetUserIntent {phrase}

This ensures that everything the user says will be passed straight through to the Microsot Bot. We're not going to be using any of the intent or entity recognition features of Alexa.

Set up the Microsoft Bot

Head on over to the Microsoft Bot Framework and create yourself a new bot (if you didn't already have one). Set up a DirectLine channel. This is how the bridge will talk to the Bot.

Set up ngrok (for local dev/testing)

Get yourself ngrok. To test both the bridge and the bot on your local machine you'll need two ngrok instances running.

ngrok http 8080 <- The bridge
ngrok http 3979 <- The Bot

Configure Alexa Skill

Take the public ngrok endpoint for the 8080 port and use it to configure an HTTP endpoint for the sklill in the Alexa Skill configuration. Use the https protocol and add /messages. Final url should look something like this: https://7dd4dd1f.ngrok.io/messages.

Configure Bot

Take the public endpoint for the 3979 (or whatever you chose) port and use as the messaging endpoint in the configration for the Micrsoft bot.

Start the alexa-bridge

Now we can start the bridge, but let's do a quick bit of configuration first:

Configuring the alexa-bridge

There are only two configuration settings:

• botId - The Bot identity in the conversation. This won't actually be seen anywhere at present.
• directLineSecret - The secret created when setting up the DirectLine channel for the Bot.

You can either put these in a file called localConfig.json in the bridge's working directory e.g.

{
   "botId" : "YOUR_BOT_ID_HERE",
   "directLineSecret" : "YOUR_SECRET_HERE"
}

or you can put those settings in the local environment e.g.

export botId = "YOUR_BOT_ID_HERE"
...

Starting the alexa-bridge

tobybrad@localhost:~/src/alexa-bridge$ node ./server.js
Starting...
restify listening at http://[::]:8080

At this point you should be able to use the test page on the Alexa Skill configuration to send utterances to the bridge. You'll get no replies of course but ngrok should show you connections are being made.

Start the Bot

How you do this depends on whether you're in Node or C#, but I'm trusting you can figure this out.