Now let’s go over the handlers.When a user says “Alexa, ask Recipe Locator to add a recipe”, the AddRecipeIntent will be fired.
Your interaction model is now ready to be used by your skill. For the utterance, add “Add a recipe”.This intent has 2 utterances: “Get random” and “Get a random recipe”.
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. However, we do need to set up at least one or our app won’t support dialogs at all.
It should look like below:Ok, we are now ready to deploy our code and test it on our Echo. This will allow you to test your skill by running your backend on your local machine.4. This is basically a UI for generating your intent schema. Once you’ve added it, you’ll be taken to a screen where you can add the utterances that trigger it and its slots. This public URL can change every time you run your ngrok server, so this an example URL. DynamoDB charges for reading, writing, and storing data in your DynamoDB tables, along with any optional features you choose to enable. Provide DynamoDB execution permission to the Lambda.
Create your skill builder object by using the constructor for the StandardSkillBuilder class. It enables Python developers to create, configure, and manage AWS services such as DynamoDB. DynamoDB Starter Alexa Template. The app itself is a simple recipe organizer. Once you start your server in Visual Studio Code, you can navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5000/ in your browser, where you should see the message “Hello, Flask!”Now that you have a public URL to connect to your skill backend, you can update the endpoint information.1.
This section contains hands-on tutorials to help you learn about Amazon DynamoDB. Create a resource object representing the local DynamoDB by defining the resource to be used and the endpoint where the local DynamoDB server is running on.4. Once we have successfully obtained a value, we now can confirm that we’ve understood what the user said correctly. The utterance will just be “{RecipeName}”. It also provides optional parameters for configuring the DynamoDB table options. I will go over that process at the end.Now for our custom slot types, we need to add some acceptable values.Next we are going to set up a dialog for this slot. By adding a few lines of code, you can run any of your Alexa skills in Python on a local server, and use your favorite code editor to do step-by-step debugging and track down possible issues.
After saving our userId and slots to local variables for conciseness, we then enter our first dialog. You can retrieve and save your persistent attributes to DynamoDB with the following prompts:If you are (or are thinking of) using AWS Lambda, testing and debugging may not be straightforward outside of using CloudWatch Logs. AWS Documentation Amazon DynamoDB Developer Guide. If you want to test whether or not your public URL (https://9cdaeb58.ngrok.io in this example) is working as expected, you can just type it in your browser and you should see the message “Hello, Flask!” again.
For its slot type, this time we are going to create a custom slot type. Go ahead, I’ll wait…I hope you found this tutorial helpful. One important thing to note is that editing your code inline means that you will be forced to use the version of the Alexa SDK that is installed on Lambda and that is generally behind the latest version and may be lacking some major features. You can also use your favorite code editor to do step-by-step debugging and track down possible issues.Next, take the following steps:3. Designed by AWS experts, this course helps you develop the skills you need for building applications that use Amazon DynamoDB. It communicates with the Alexa voice service and follows a particular interaction pattern. If you get stuck on anything, please feel free to contact me.
Lambda gives you a few ways to do that. Let’s skip over these for a second. DynamoDB has two capacity modes and those come with specific billing options for processing reads and writes on your tables: on-demand and provisioned. Select “HTTPS” under “Service Endpoint Type,” and then enter your public URL in the “Default Region” field. I highly recommend using this tool instead of typing out a couple hundred lines of JSON. We first check if we have a value for the RecipeName slot and if not, prompt the user for it. A very powerful feature of the new Alexa SDK, is the ability to save session data to DynamoDB with one line of code. Now that your endpoint is defined, you can save it.5. It has a GetRecipeQuickOrLong slot which has a custom slot type of the same name. Then, create a Flask web server from the Flask module using the prompt below:The local DynamoDB uses port 8000 by default.Now that your skill is running as a local Flask server, we need to make it available as an endpoint to the Alexa cloud service.2.