how to make slots output different responses - alexa

Question

Doing some smart home skill development and my Intent utterance is "how long until my battery is {state}" State being either empty or full. I know I could do this with different intents but I wont want to have two many intents as I already have many. I basically want the user to say either full or empty in place of {state}. and then from there, depending on their answer, give different answers for full or empty. I haven't found much online so i hope you guys can help. Im also new to code.

Answer 1

You should create a slot for your battery state:
{
"name": "BatteryState",
"values": [
{
"id": "empty",
"name": {
"value": "empty"
}
},
{
"id": "full",
"name": {
"value": "full"
}
}
]
}
You can create it by yourself in the UI or paste in types collection in JSON editor.
Then use created slot in your intent
{
"name": "BatteryStateIntent",
"slots": [
{
"name": "batteryState",
"type": "BatteryState"
}
],
"samples": [
"how long until my battery is {batteryState}"
]
}
You can create it by yourself in the UI or paste in intents collection in JSON editor.
Then in the code:
const BatteryStateIntentHandler = {
canHandle(handlerInput) {
return (
Alexa.getRequestType(handlerInput.requestEnvelope) === "IntentRequest" &&
Alexa.getIntentName(handlerInput.requestEnvelope) === "BatteryStateIntent"
);
},
handle(handlerInput) {
const batteryStatus =
handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.intent.slots.batteryState.value;
let speakOutput = "";
if (batteryStatus === "full") {
const timeToFull = 10; // or some sophisticated calculations ;)
speakOutput += `Your battery will be full in ${timeToFull} minutes!`;
} else if (batteryStatus === "empty") {
const timeToEmpty = 5; // or some sophisticated calculations ;)
speakOutput += `Your battery will be full in ${timeToEmpty} minutes!`;
} else {
speakOutput += "I don't know this status";
}
return handlerInput.responseBuilder
.speak(speakOutput)
.reprompt(speakOutput)
.getResponse();
},
};
Make sure you used the same intent name as in the builder. And at the end, add created intent handler to request handlers:
exports.handler = Alexa.SkillBuilders.custom()
.addRequestHandlers(
BatteryStateIntentHandler,
// ...
)
.lambda();