My First Alexa Skill -- Quiz on the Top 50 Podcasts in the United States

Last year, I took on a rotational assignment in my company in a software engineering role. Although I'm currently in a new rotation as a Product Lead for one of my company's modeling and simulation software products, I've realized that I enjoy writing software. There exist many ways to write your own software and create products that you can sell to customers. I recently discovered the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). Basically, you can write your own skill for Alexa and link In Skill Purchases to monetize your skill. I started going through Amazon's Skill tutorials, so I can learn how to make Alexa skills. To date, I've created a skill I've titled "US Podcasts Top 50 Quiz" that was based off of the ASK beginners tutorial called the Quiz Game Skill. In this post, I will talk about my impressions of developing my first skill. Click to tweet

To get started with developing Alexa skills, you need to setup two different accounts:

1. Alexa Skills Developer
2. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Don't worry, both of these accounts are free to setup. Obviously, you need to setup an Alexa Skills Developer account to develop your skills. It is not so obvious that you need an AWS account. Unless you have your own business / website account through an Internet Service Provider, you will need to setup a free AWS account to host your skills and any files you need for Alexa displays. The AWS Lamda Free Tier is limited in the sense that you get 1 million requests per year. However, unless your Alexa skills go viral, you will not need to upgrade your AWS free account.

Once I got my ASK developer and AWS free accounts setup, I went through the Quiz Game Skill tutorial / example. The quiz game is simple: You open the skill, and Alexa gives you a prompt telling you that she can quiz you on the 50 States in the USA, or she can give you more information on one of the fifty states. The tutorial gives you multiple options on how you want to develop this skill:

• Through the ASK Developers Portal
• Via the ASK Command Line Interface (CLI)
• Through AWS Hosted Instructions

If this is your first time developing an Alexa skill, you should choose the ASK Developers Portal option. The Developers Portal is a web-based area where you can develop your Alexa Skills. The portal is simple to use. The kicker is that you need to remember to include all of the files that the tutorial says to copy. (If you are an experienced programmer who feels comfortable developing code from scratch, I suggest that you choose the ASK CLI option. You will need to git clone the Quiz Games code and edit it through your own IDE of choice.)

Using the first option, you will need to create a new skill in your Developers Portal. I found this simple to do, as the tutorial gives step-by-step instructions. Once you create your skill named "Quiz Show," you will need to copy three files (via copy and paste) into the portal:

1. The Interaction Model
2. index.js: A node.js file containing all of the Javascript code for invoking Alexa and having her run your skill
3. package.json: A JSON file that includes your skill's name, versioning information, and dependencies

When you go through the tutorial, you will name your skill "Game Show" or something like it. At a later time, you will want to rename your skill to reflect the skill you intend to publish. In my case, I renamed my skill at certification. I'll talk about certification later.

Getting the original skill running through the Developers Portal is simple: Once you copy the files over, you select the "Test" tab and enable Development per the tutorial instructions. When I first got my Game Quiz skill setup, all the simulated Alexa would do was give the help instructions (i.e., tell me about the skill and what she could do with it). After some detailed troubleshooting, I realized I skipped the step to copy the Interaction Model into my own code. I did that, built the model in the Build tab, and deployed my skill in the Code tab.

With the Fifty US States Quiz Show skill working, I decided to re-purpose it into my own quiz show skill. I decided on making a quiz show based off the Top 100 US Podcasts, but I limited it to the Top 50 because I did not see value in quizzing all 100 podcasts. I chose podcasts as a quiz topic because I enjoy listening to podcasts during my commute, and I was curious if any of the podcasts I listen to are on that list. I quickly decided I needed to learn the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) because the answers to the quiz are included in the interaction model, and the quiz details are included in the node.js formatted index.js file. Luckily, Google Chrome has a JSON extension that makes it easy to understand JSON formatting. In short, modifying the tutorial files to create your own skill involves a few steps:

1. Rewording the Alexa statements (i.e., how Alexa responds to your voice commands) to be specific to your skill in the index.js file.
2. Including your quiz data in the index.js file in a JSON like format. (I say like because the data fields are not surrounded by quotation marks as in the standard JSON format).
3. Writing the Alexa skill invocation in the Interaction Model (i.e., "open podcast top fifty quiz")
4. Including any JSON custom field definitions in the Interaction Model.
5. Writing sample Alexa interactions (i.e., "give me a quiz", or "tell me about XYZ") in the Interaction Model

To get your new skill to work with Alexa, it is important that the Interaction Model JSON data agrees with the data set in your index.js file. I copied the Podcast information (title, artist, network, ranking) into a CSV file and used a CSV to JSON converter to format the information for inclusion in my index.js file and Interaction Model. Because I needed to do this for each slot (i.e., data object), I found it easier to save the Interaction Model into its own JSON file that included everything, and I edited the file in Notepad++. Of course, I used the Chrome JSON extension to check my formatting to make sure I did not miss a bracket before pasting the entire Interaction Model in the Developers Portal's built in JSON editor.

Once I finished the five steps above, I tested my new Alexa skill via the Test tab. Testing a skill is fairly simple: You invoke the Alexa skill using the invocation phrase, and you either type in the user responses, or you say your response after holding down the microphone icon. The Test window shows you both the JSON inputs to your skill, and your skill's outputs. I found this advantageous to test my skill by cheating on my quiz. Clearly, I didn't care that I gamed my own quiz because my intent was to see if the skill counted my answer as incorrect if I gave the correct answer. I learned through this exercise to type out numbers (i.e., five instead of 5) because the Test tab does not automatically recognize numeric. After reading Amazon's ASK documentation, it notes that the standard way of testing using numbers is to write out the number if you type to test the skill.

Clearly, the next step after I successfully developed my skill is to publish it. Amazon has skill developers go through a new skill certification process via the Developer portal Distribution tab. This process makes sure that your skill meets Amazon's standards. You first write a description of your skill and sample invocations. This part of the certification process is important because people find your skill by searching keywords found in the description. After you enter information describing the skill, the ASK Developer Portal runs basic tests that your skill must pass. Once your skill passes these steps, it is sent to Amazon for their developers to review and either accept or send back to you with suggested changes. As of this post, my Top 50 US Podcasts Quiz skill is waiting on the Amazon review.

Once you develop skills, you can monetize them by adding In Skill Products (ISPs). ISPs can be skill add-ons, products that you sell through Amazon, or services you sell through your skill. Think of add-ons as gaming additions: You install a game skill that includes just the basics, and your customer can buy additions to this game. For example, if you develop an automobile quiz game, you could make your basic skill to include cars made by Ford. If your customer likes your Ford cars quiz, you could up-sell add-ons that include questions on cars made by Chevrolet, Honda, Toyota, and so-on. I will talk about ISPs in a different post.

In closing, Alexa skills are fairly simple to develop using the ASK Developer Portal. I will keep you posted on the status of my Top 50 US Podcasts Quiz and other skills I develop using the ASK tutorials in future post. If you like this post, and you have an Ad Blocker enabled, please whitelist my page and click through the Amazon links. I am a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program, and get credit only for purchases made through my links.