How to Develop Alexa Skills: The Guide for Beginners

You want to develop Amazon Alexa Skills for Echo?

You want to learn how to program a working Voice User Interface?

The Alexa Skill Development Manual is just right for this

What is this manual about? Here is an overview of the structure:

Introduction: Programming Amazon Alexa Skills

Alexa development environment

What essential terms should you know about Alexa Skill development?

What do I have to consider to create a good voice user interface? Which rules does Amazon set?

Develop and deploy a skill

Here we go into detail and get to know Alexa Skills. What species are there?

Developing a skill for the first time: we get to know the building blocks of skill development step by step.

There follows a short introduction to Node.js, a javascript variant that is handy for Alexa Skills.

Create an Alexa Flash Briefing Skill: we create a Flash Briefing Skill. It's fast.

Program an Alexa Custom Skill: now it's time to go into the matter with several variants, Hello World, Connection to an API, Alexa Presentation Language...

Test Alexa Skills. We get to know four different ways and automated test frameworks.

Special topics for the development of Alexa Skills

Further information

Frequently asked questions and recommendations

The future and last words

The Alexa Skill Development Manual

The whole thing on about 240 pages. I had already started writing a book on the development of Alexa Skills at the end of 2017, and have been working on this topic ever since. In the meantime Amazon has not remained idle and has changed a whole series of important things in the Alexa development environment, such as the Alexa Skills Kit and the Alexa Presentation Language, as well as the SDKs for Node.js, Python, and Java introduced, the monetization enabled, the templates introduced, and so on.

At the same time skills are not just any small Java program, but integrated functions, for whose efficient development one should have good knowledge of the AWS world. At the same time you must not only pay attention to the technology, but also create a good voice user interface ... because Alexa often has no graphical user interface, and if she has one (Amazon Echo Show / Echo Spot), then you have to follow your own rules, which are given by Amazon.

Why is Amazon Alexa important?

If you combine this complexity with the statement that voice user interface design and development, as well as voice search optimization are among the big trends of the coming years, you will notice that it is a good idea to deal with Alexa. An excerpt from my book:

"Language assistants have been used more and more in recent years. If the first step towards the so-called "mobile first" was already a step that lastingly changed the online world - and our own behavior -, then the step towards the speech-oriented world of devices is another step: "Voice First". Further steps will lead to the increased use of artificial intelligence in everyday life, which can be well combined with language assistants."

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