Alexa Skill Development Services

You should start by considering how you want people to interact with Alexa and how they really will interact with it. While some users naturally understand how to interact with Alexa, many others will assume that a voice interface will behave similarly to other natural voice interactions especially with ChatGPT as a benchmark. So here are a few questions to consider:

- What user requests can the Alexa skill manage (these are the intents)?
- What will users need to say to get a response?
- What will Alexa supply in the response?
- How will you manage unclear or inappropriate language?

In any given interaction between speakers, there are plenty of instances where the words alone do not always adequately relay meaning, such as inferences or idioms. Your UI will need to incorporate an understanding of how people are likely to act.

There are several great tutorials on how to use the console if you are a developer and want to get started. We'd recommend this as the first stop for any developer, so you can head on over to the Amazon Developer Console. Select “Your Alexa Consoles,” “Skills” and then “Create Skill” to begin development. Then name your Alexa skill. Make sure you choose “Custom” for your model. If you are a developer and confident in your own ability to create an Alexa skill the Amazon Developer Console is the best first stop.

Your skill now needs an interaction model that includes the intents (what kinds of requests your skill is going to manage), sample utterances (what people will say to get a response) and the dialog model (the information and prompts for Alexa). This work can be done via Amazon Lex service or through a 3rd party dialog flow engine or natural language service. Our perspective here is based on your needs as the customer. If you believe your skill is simple and easy to maintain on your own, then we would strongly suggest using the Amazon supplied tool kit. However, if you have proprietary data or will need more complete control we would suggest taking using a 3rd party service.

The simplest start here is to begin with an AWS Lambda function that lets you run your code without needing to manage any servers. Lambda allows you to build your Alexa skill using Node.js, Java, Python or C#. After you update your skill with an endpoint, make sure you test your code using either an Alexa device or the “Test” page. At this stage, you might also want to run a beta test in order to fix any bugs before moving to the submission stage.

To create an Alexa skill takes some thought about how your users will interact with it, but the actual development process is straightforward. While Amazon provides quite a few supplemental documents to help you along the way, building a good Alexa Skill is complex and managing it over time can be quite complicated. Azumo, as an Alexa Skill Development company, can help you build and manage your skill.