Chapter 1
Alexa, Hello

Voice is powerful. The words you say can make someone smile and laugh, with equal capacity for bringing tears or stirring anger. The spoken word can inspire, educate, and command. New parents are overjoyed when their baby says their first word, while veteran parents are often exasperated by the words said by their teenager. The ability to speak and be heard is one of the most versatile and potent abilities given to humans.

Until recently, however, computers and the applications we use haven’t been able to share that power with us. We have been forced to communicate with computers by typing, clicking, tapping, and reading a screen—an interface that is natural to computers, even if unnatural to humans.

Voice platforms such as Amazon Alexa are changing the human-to-computer interface. Applications can now listen to what we say and respond with spoken words that we can hear. We can now talk to our applications in a conversational style that is very much the same as how we communicate with each other.

Having an Alexa device in the room changes how you do everyday things. Here are just a few examples:

• If you want to know what the weather forecast is, you can ask “Alexa, what’s the weather?” instead of navigating to a weather website on your computer.

• Rather than fumble with the buttons on an alarm clock, you can say, “Alexa, set an alarm for 6:00 a.m.”

• To find out when a movie is playing, you can ask, “Alexa, when is Doctor Sleep playing nearby?” which is much more convenient than looking it up on your phone or in a newspaper.

And this is just a sampling of what Alexa can do. Once you start talking with Alexa, you may start to think that there’s nothing she doesn’t know or can’t do. But in reality, her abilities are only limited by what skills have been developed for her. While Alexa may be able to tell you what time the local Taco Bell closes or if your flight is on time, there’ll always be things she doesn’t know or know how to do.

Skills are voice-enabled applications that are written for Alexa to expand her capabilities. This is analogous to how mobile applications expand the capabilities of smartphones and tablets, or web applications expand the functionality of the internet. By developing Alexa skills you will be able to reach Alexa users with your ideas, content, and/or business in much the same way that websites and mobile applications do for the internet and mobile devices.

Creating custom skills is what this book is all about. In this chapter, we’ll start by quickly getting to know what goes into building a skill. Then we’ll install some essential tools for working with skills and write some code that implements a custom skill that we can actually talk to. First, let’s establish a foundation by understanding how Alexa itself works.