I wish I could have those who download the skill insert a data to be used by the skill.
Example:
username: joker
team: barcelona
and use "joker" and "barcelona" in the skill.
You can.
Use intents & slots to get the information.
Use the attributes manager and a persistence adapter to remember them between sessions.
Those are all covered in the Cake Time tutorial.
https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/get-deeper/tutorials-code-samples/build-an-engaging-alexa-skill
It'll get difficult if you're trying to let them use non-words like "Pwn3dR4t" but with the right carrier phrases you should be able to set up a username intent that lets them say a pretty wide variety of words.
Related
It is possible to use Alexa skill with custom NLU without using Alexa ones? I needed it because Alexa doesn't provide context, which is crucial for my business needs. For example, I can be satisfied if I will be able to get user input from the skill.
It is up to the developer to provide context. Check out the AttributesManager in the SDK.
https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-nodejs/manage-attributes.html
You can set session or persistent attributes to "remember" the context. For example, I use session attributes and set a variable called "last_asked" to store which Yes or No question they were last asked, so the skill has the context of those generic answers.
I don't know what you exacty mean with "User Input".
If you want to have
the audio what the user is speaking - No it's not possible
the complete text what the user was speaking (speech to text) - Yes this is possible. Use a Custom Slot Type with some variances.
What do you mean with "doesn't provide context" exactly? If you know the user already in your system you could use "account linking".
I was asked to write a Skill in which users have to ask for a specific product.
Examples:
Alexa, what is the price of the Fujifilm Instax Mini 7S Camera?
Alexa, how many TOSTITOS® Tortilla Chips are left?
Question: Can I add custom brands / product names to Alexa's vocabulary?
I guess Amazon can recognize some products, but how about new brands that amazon hasn't seen yet?
If this can't be done, it makes no sense of building that Skill.
Is there any alternative? Did Google solve this problem in Google home?
Thanks!
Alexa skills has some predefined slots which could help you https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/slot-type-reference.html#list-slot-types, I'm not sure how specific you need it by your example Fujifilm Instax Mini 7S Camera, but still it would be the easiest way.
If you need more, or different, brands you can also check in that link how to have a slot with custom values, pretty much you define that in the developers console where you configure your Skill
I'm trying to restrict an echo dot to allow only my skill to be invoked on the device. This is a publicly available device so I don't want users making Alexa repeat what they say or set alarms, or basically just using any other skill than the ones I allow. How would I go about restricting access to all other skills?
I've tried going into my Amazon account to see if there were any settings I could manage, but I had no luck. Is it simply not possible to do this right now?
Thanks for any help.
For this use case you may want to look into Alexa for Business: https://aws.amazon.com/alexaforbusiness/
Is it possible to launch an Alexa App with just its name? This is similar to when you ask it what the weather is.
"Alexa, weather"
However I would like to be able to say
"Alex, weather in Chicago" and have it return that value
I can't seem to get the app to launch without a connecting word. Things like ask, open, tell would count as a connecting word.
I have searched the documentation but can't find mention of it, however there are apps in the app store that do this.
It is documented in the first item here.
I've verified that this works with my own skill. One thing I've noticed is that Alexa's speech recognition is much worse when invoked in this manner presumably because it requires matching against a greater set of possible words. I have to really enunciate in a quiet room to get Alexa to recognize my invocation name in this context.
When developing a custom skill you have to use the connecting words e.g. Alexa, ask your invocation name to do something.
If you want to pass a variable, you have to specify the sample utterances:
OneshotTideIntent get high tide
OneshotTideIntent get high tide for {City} {State}
Then you handle cases in your code when user does not provide these values. For examples see https://github.com/amzn/alexa-skills-kit-js
When writing the example phrases you use the following construct:
"Alexa, [connecting word] [your invocation name], [sample utterance]". As far as I have noticed she is rather picky and you have to be exact when invoking custom skill (the voice recognition works way better with built in skills)
EDIT: launching skill without connecting word is possible when developing "smart home" skill
I want to train nlc in such way that -
If I give an input as - "Sharpies" or "Cakes" or "iPhone6" then it should result in order as intent.
But it's not working for all the products, as intent should come for all the product names, where I would need to train NLC with few of product name and it will work for all the products (dynamically).
As we have thousands of products, how can get the intent as "order" for all products instead of adding all in ".csv" (Don't want to hard code all the product names)?
Can you please help me with this to retrieve the exact intent for all dyanmical products name as input to NLC?
What you are trying to do is not what NLC is intended for.
The purpose of intent is to understand what it is the end user is trying to achieve, not what products/keywords may appear in a sentence.
For example "I want to buy an iPhone" vs "I want to unlock my iPhone". Both mention iPhone but have two very different intents. In this case with training, you can distinguish between wanting to purchase, vs wanting to unlock.
One option you can try is looking at the Alchemy API entity extraction.
Another option is to use Watson Explorer Studio. But you will need Watson explorer to get it. There is Watson Knowledge Studio coming soon, which like WEX-Studio allows you to build custom annotators. You can use these annotators with UIMA to parse your text.
So you could easily build something to understand that "I don't want to buy an iPhone" is not the same as "I want to buy an iPhone", and have it extract iPhone as a product.
There is unsupported old free version of WEX-Studio called Languageware, if you want to see if that can help. That site contains manual and videos. Here is a video which I did that gives an example of how you would use it.