Developing skills and actions

Both Amazon and Google see the value of the developer community as the key to the success of their voice assistants. As such, the two platforms offer development consoles that let developers build and deploy voice applications. In this section, we will focus on the set of tools offered by the Amazon Alexa Developer portal and the Google Assistant, and offer a step-by-step tutorial to get started.

Whether building an Amazon Alexa skill or a Google Home action, those kinds of applications are built to provide answers to the user's requests. With this in mind, when building those skills, we should think of them as being in a Q&A format. This means that we will figure out what the user will say or ask, and then what the response should be.

Here is a simple example: a user says, I need help with my insurance.

Your skill/action responds, Please call us at 1-800-1234-567.

When we analyze the preceding request and response, we build them into the following...