March, 2017 | Hecklers in Development

Hecklers in Development
Code, coffee, & camaraderie. Collection, unordered. ;)

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.twitter4j</groupId>
  <artifactId>twitter4j-core</artifactId
  <version>[4.0,)</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.amazon.alexa</groupId>
  <artifactId>alexa-skills-kit</artifactId>
  <version>1.2</version>
  <exclusions>
    <exclusion>
      <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>slf4j-log4j12</artifactId>
    </exclusion>
  </exclusions>
</dependency>

NOTE 1: Twitter4j included for the Tweet Retriever project, may not apply to yours.

NOTE 2: The exclusion is currently necessary to avoid conflicts with dependencies included by Spring Boot’s starters.

Create a mechanism that will implement your desired “back end” functionality: retrieving a tweet, requesting weather from a public REST API, etc.
(Optional, strictly speaking) Create a REST endpoint you can use to test via web browser (old school text) 😉
To save yourself a lot of time & potential frustration, do the previous step. Then test. Extensively. Don’t continue until everything works the way you would like as a “plain old web service”. Once that works, then proceed to the next step.
Create an Intent Schema (JSON format) as required by the Alexa service. Within this schema, you’ll want/need to specify what intents your app will recognize and what slots (variables) are allowed or expected for each intent.
If you specify a slot, you’ll likely have a list of expected values for that slot (note that this is not a closed list per Amazon, but “more like guidelines”, for better & worse). I find it helpful to specify those slot values in separate files and store them (along with other textual inputs such as the Intent Schema & sample utterances Alexa uses for voice recog) with this project under a speechAssets directory in the project’s resources. Please refer to the project repo (link at bottom) for more information.
Create Sample Utterances Alexa will use to help guide its voice recognition, leveraging any slots you’ve defined in your Intent Schema. For example, in my Random Tweet skill, I define the following slot:

{
  "intent": "TweetIntent",
  "slots": [
    {
      "name": "Action",
      "type": "LIST_OF_ACTIONS"
    }
  ]
}

I specify valid actions as:

get
give
play
provide
show
read

To tie it together, one of my sample utterances is:

TweetIntent {Action} a tweet

The end result is that one way to activate the skill (once all steps are completed and the application is deployed) is with the following syntax:

"Alexa, ask Tweet Retriever to {get|give|play|provide|show|read} a tweet"

Create a Speechlet that implements Alexa’s Speechlet interface
Register that Speechlet (servlet) with your application, providing an endpoint (see above) with which Alexa will interact
Deploy the application to your cloud provider (Cloud Foundry, of course!)
Create the skill in the Amazon (Alexa) developer portal and make note of the Application Id Amazon assigns in the Skill Information page

NOTE: Be sure to include the endpoint address you specified when registering the speechlet in your application

Set your application’s required env vars (including the Application Id above), then restart the application to allow it to incorporate the updated values
From the Test page of the Skills portal, test the skill by invoking with textually and note the results
Next, test using your Echo device. This step is critical because it adds the voice recognition/parsing engine to the mix and often exposes issues that text-based invocations don’t.
If everything works as desired and you would like to share your skill with a larger community (Optional), publish your skill. You’ll need to provide a few additional bits of information & a couple icons, and it will need to be tested and verified by Amazon prior to it being published. If it fails, Amazon is quite good about providing feedback over any small items you missed and suggested remedies. Lather, rinse, repeat until successful. 😉

Caveats

This project is very early stage and thus very rough, so please keep the following things in mind:

This is version 0.1. It will change, it will improve. It’s an MBVP, a Minimum Barely Viable Product.
Alexa VR is unkind at times. 😉 For this 0.1 release, I incorporated a couple hacks to get more reliable results for certain Twitter handles:
- For Andrew Clay Shafer’s Twitter handle (a compound word with two dictionary words, “little” & “idea”)
- For my Twitter handle (a non-word that is stated as a combination of letters & a “word”, “M K Heck”). Twitter handles consisting of a single dictionary word pose no problem for Alexa/Twitter
I included Andrew’s handle per DaShaun’s request (see above)…and mine because I didn’t want to creep on Andrew by issuing repeated calls to Alexa while testing. 🙂 Feel free to adjust for your circumstances, if so desired.

For more Information

Get Tweet Retriever’s ax-random-tweet code here, check it out, and if you’re so inclined, submit a pull request! And thanks for reading.

Cheers,
Mark

Tags: alexa, Cloud, Cloud Foundry, random tweet, Spring Boot, tweet, Twitter, voice

Categories

Inspiration

How to develop an Alexa skill

Overview

More details, please

Caveats

For more Information

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