Smooch Alexa Skill

This example demonstrates how to setup your own Smooch Alexa skill using AWS Lambdas. It allows Alexa users to send plain-text messages as Smooch appUser messages. It also provides subsequent appMaker messages as responses, if they are received within Alexa's response window.

Use-cases

• Deploying chat bots to Alexa
• Creating multi-channel chat experiences that are initiated via Alexa voice commands. Imagine: Person: Alexa, reserve Magpie Pizzeria for 3 tonight at 7 pm. Alexa: Reserving Magpie restaurant at 7pm. I'll send you confirmation by SMS, Dave.

How it works

In the Alexa Developer Portal you can add your own skill. To do so you need to define the available intents and then connect them to a Lambda. You can update and define the Lambda with Serverless.

Setup

Deploying to AWS Lambdas

In order to use this example you must have serverless on your machine, follow the instructions here to install it. If this is your first time using serverless, you will also need to configure credentials for AWS on your local machine.

To install this skill on your machine, run:

serverless install -u https://github.com/smooch/smooch-alexa -n smooch-alexa
cd smooch-alexa
npm install

In serverless.yml replace the sample Smooch account secret key pair and app ID with you own, like so:

APP_ID: 591b60913884d169009e02de
KEY_ID: act_586fca99e1532b45008cbbf2
SECRET: 3GVUJ67voOxr1QH5p5_o_2tQ

In order to deploy the endpoint, run:

serverless deploy

The expected result should be similar to:

Serverless: Packaging service...
Serverless: Uploading CloudFormation file to S3...
Serverless: Uploading service .zip file to S3 (378 B)...
Serverless: Updating Stack...
Serverless: Checking Stack update progress...
.........
Serverless: Stack update finished...
Serverless: Removing old service versions...
Service Information
service: smooch-alexa-dev
stage: dev
region: us-east-1
api keys:
  None
endpoints:
  None
functions:
  smooch: smooch-alexa-dev-smooch

Configuring the Alexa Skill

Next we need to setup an Alexa skill. Once you've signed up for the Amazon Developer Platform visit the Alexa developer console page. There you should see the following screen and click "Get Started" on "Alexa Skill Kit":

Next click on Add a new Skill:

Go through the steps and fill in all the required fields e.g. Intent Schema and Sample Utterances:

Intent Schema

{
  "intents": [
    {
      "intent": "RawText",
      "slots": [
        {
          "name": "text",
          "type": "AMAZON.LITERAL"
        }]
    },
    {
      "intent": "AMAZON.StopIntent"
    },
    {
      "intent": "AMAZON.CancelIntent"
    }
  ]
}

Sample Utterances

RawText {word|text}
RawText {this is a sentence|text}

Fill in the Lambda ARN with the ARN value displayed in the AWS lambda console. To retrieve the ARN login to your console and select the Lambda that was generated by serverless, the ARN will be displayed in the Lambda function's config.

Test

Next up visit the test page, fill in the utterance and click on Ask the-name-of-your-skill.

You should have received a response containing the text of any appMaker message you've configured to respond, or "text": "Haven't heard anything back. Try again later." if no appMaker message was sent.

Tools and reference

You can also test your skill using a service like echosim.io.

Check out this Amazon guide to learn more about how to submit your skill for publication.