Good day to you, fellow Trailblazers! Today's Badge-A-Day is Alexa Development Basics. I've never done any development work with Alexa, but I'm excited to start learning. Intelligent home assistants are exploding in popularity everywhere, and Alexa leads the way. Let's dive in and learn a little about the Salesforce and Alexa integration.

GET STARTED WITH ALEXA KEY CONCEPTS

• Amazon believes voice represents the next major disruption in computing.
• Advancements in neural nets, natural language processing, and speech recognition is transforming the way we interact with computers. through Voice User Interfaces (VUI).
• VUI has evolved over time, from call trees (Press 1 for X, 2 for y) to a more conversational flow that is natural for users and allows them to be more succinct and accurate in their request.
• This evolution is referred to as conversational user interface.
• Alexa is the brain behind the Amazon echo devices.
• When you say the wake word (Alexa), the light ring around the Echo glows blue to indicate Alexa is now listening and streaming that data to the cloud.
• The captured audio is called an utterance.
• You can change the wake word to Echo, Computer, and Amazon.
• One the utterance has been received, a series of speech models are applied to it using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU).
• Alexa determines what the intent is. Intents are registered by a skill that can handle the intents, and the skill provides a number of sample utterances to help Alexa map out where requests go.
• Skills are built by the Alexa Skills Kit, a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples that makes it fast and easy to build for voice.
• Skills can be built using AWS Lambda, Heroku, and custom web services communicated over HTTPS.
• The skill is then responsible for returning a response to Alexa.
• The response can be formatted to be spoken by Alexa or using prerecorded audio.

LEARN TO DESIGN A VOICE USER INTERFACE KEY CONCEPTS

• First clearly establish the skill's purpose.
• Write scripts and flows for how people talk, not how they read and write.
• Consider what users can say in the conversation.
• Key parts of the script: Wake word, Launch, Invocation name, Utterance, One-shot utterance, Slot value, and Intent.
• Your skill doesn't need to list out all possible utterances in order to capture the right intent, but more examples help.
• Responses should be brief enough to say in one breath.
• Craft the response to sound like a real person.
• Don't leave things open ended.
• Consider adding variety and a little bit of humor.

DISCOVER THE ALEXA SKILLS KIT

• Smart home: Control smart lights, thermostats, smart cameras, entertainment devices, and more using voice. 
• Flash briefing: Share the latest news headlines, weather updates, and more.
• Video: Enable customers to easily find and consume video content without invoking a specific skill or specifying a provider.
• Custom: Anything you can imagine!
• The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples that makes it fast and easy for you to add skills to Alexa.
• Learn, Design, Build, and Launch your skill.
• Your skill must be certified before it can be launched.