Developing Alexa Skills using NodeJS
Alexa Skills are becoming increasingly important for businesses and organisations. This specialist training program is designed to teach developers how to create Alexa skills and give them confidence in creating their own skills for their organisation or company. This training course can also be delivered as part of a longer program covering also in depth NodeJS training, TDD training, and continuous integration and delivery training. Contact us for more information on this program.
Prerequisites
- Experience in NodeJS development is a distinct advantage although the course could be delivered with Python
Contents
Introduction to Alexa
- What is Alexa
- Examples of Alexa Skills
- Types of Chatbots
- Creating an Alexa Skill
Voice UX Best Practices
- Best Practices in Voice UX
- Things to avoid in Voice UX
Cloud Infrastructure Overview
- Overview of AWS Architecture
- Regions and Zones
- Storage options
- Containers on AWS
- Serverless Architectures with AWS
Security and the Cloud
- Security Overview
- Responsibilities of Cloud provider
- Responsibilities of the cloud Customer
- Securing your infrastructure
- Managing teams access to your infrastructure
Introduction to AWS Lambda
- What are Lambda Functions
- Benefits of Lambda Functions
- How to create Lambda Functions for Alexa
- Example Alexa Lambda Functions
Using the ASK-CLI
- Installing the CLI
- Creating a new Skill
- Understanding the Skill JSON structure
- Deploying the skill using ASK
Managing State
- Request scoped attributes
- Session scoped attributes
- Persistent Attributes
- Storing Persistent Attributes using DynamoDB
- Using the Attributes Manager from a Lambda
Handling Audio and Video
- Streaming audio and video
- Using the Audio and Video Player
- Video and the Echo Show
Linking Accounts
- Linking User Accounts with a Skill
- OAuth Authentication and Alexa
Testing Alexa Skills
- Using Bespoken to test a Skill
- Using virtual.alexa.utter
- Running everything locally
- Considerations for UAT and Alexa skills
Alexa Skill Deployment
- Automated deployment using ask-cli
- Building skills using Docker containers
- Deployment using AWS CodeBuild and CodeDeploy
