Alexa Skills are growing in popularity and 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.

Duration: 4 days

Who is it for: Experienced NodeJS developers who need to learn how to build and deploy Alexa skills.

Layout: This course is a blend of lectures and practical exercises.

Modules

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

Natural Language Processing

• What is NLP
• What can you do with NLP?
• Overview of Natural Language Processing
• Worked Python example of Sentiment analysis
• NLP and Alexa

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
• Integration with Jenkins for deployment and testing
• Deployment using AWS CodeBuild

Enquire about this course

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