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Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex

You're reading from   Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex Create custom conversational and voice interfaces for your Amazon Echo devices and web platforms

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Product type Paperback
Published in Sep 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788993487
Length 266 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Sam Williams Sam Williams
Author Profile Icon Sam Williams
Sam Williams
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Table of Contents (13) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Understanding Chatbots FREE CHAPTER 2. Getting Started with AWS and Amazon CLI 3. Creating Your First Alexa Skill 4. Connecting Your Alexa Skills to External APIs 5. Building Your First Amazon Lex Chatbot 6. Connecting a Lex Bot to DynamoDB 7. Publishing Your Chatbot to Facebook, Slack, Twilio, and HTTP 8. Improving the User Experience for Your Bots 9. Review and Continued Development 10. Other Books You May Enjoy Appendix A 1. Appendix B

Connecting Your Alexa Skills to External APIs

In this chapter, we will expand upon the basics we learned from the previous chapter, to improve the functionality and user experience of Alexa. We'll increase the functionality by learning to use external APIs to interact with services provided by other people. Then, we'll increase the user experience by giving our chatbot some memory of the existing conversation and also using a speech synthesis markup language (SSML) to control the way that Alexa talks to the user.

To enable us to learn this, we're going to build a weather skill for Alexa. You will be able to ask for the current or five-day forecast for 200,000 cities across the world.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Accessing and interacting with an external API
  • Storing session memory using session attributes
  • Using SSML to control the way that...
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