Chapter 5
Integrating User Data

With many things in this world, there’s usually more than meets the eye. When you watch a movie or a TV show, you often think of the actors who play the main characters, but probably don’t often think much about those behind the scenes who catered the filming, built the sets, or created the costumes. When you go out to a nice restaurant, you interface with your server and might even acknowledge the chef, but rarely consider the farmer who grew the vegetables or the driver who delivered the unprepared food in their truck. Even this book that you’re reading is the product of many more hands than just the one whose name appears on the cover.

Alexa skills are often much the same—there’s usually more than meets the ear. You will speak with Alexa and she will respond to your queries based on the skill’s programming. But it’s not unusual for an Alexa skill to draw on one or more backend services to fulfill its functionality. From the user’s perspective, it’s just a front end skill that they talk to. But in reality the skill may simply be a voice-enabled facade to a much larger backend system.

In this chapter, we’re going to expand the Star Port 75 Travel skill beyond its own perimeter and have it coordinate with services that will make it more complete. We’ll start by leveraging a service provided by the Alexa platform itself and then step even further outside of the skill by applying account linking to consume an external, OAuth 2-secured REST API.