We used ASK CLI to create our Alexa skill. We can also use the developer portal UI or a voice app platform (more information on this can be found in the There's more section).

ASK CLI provides a set of high-level commands, as well as a set of low-level commands. High-level commands include commands such as ask new, ask deploy, and so on that make the creation and deployment of skills very easy. The ask new command creates a sample skill, sample Lambda, and all the required files from a template that you can modify. The ask deploy command allows you to deploy the skill to the developer portal easily.

Low-level commands, on the other hand, provide more flexibility as to what you want to do with your skill. They allow you to work on only the skill or lambda. The low-level command steps also correspond to the steps we perform from the developer portal UI. In this recipe, we use the low-level set of commands to create and deploy the Alexa skill. We create and deploy the lambda in the same way that we have been doing in the previous recipes in this book. 

To create a skill with ASK CLI, we created and used the following two files:

• skill.json: This is the skill manifest JSON file. It is the JSON representation of the skill and contains the required metadata for your skill. 
• en-US.json: This is the locale-specific model file for the US locale. This file defines the invocation name, intents, and the sample utterances. We created the model file only for the US locale. You could, however, create model files for other supported locales as well. I have included more than one locale with code files to refer to.