How to use Dialog.ElicitSlot for Python as Runtime environment - alexa

Question

I want to fill a slot not at the beginning of the invocation of the intent, but at a later part in the intent request. I want to provide user some options, and I want them to select one out of those. For that I'm trying to use Dialog.ElicitSlot, but somehow I'm getting an error :
"Request to skill endpoint resulted in an error."
I'm returning this when I need the user to select an option from my list.
return {
"version": "1.0",
"sessionAttributes": {},
"response": {
"outputSpeech": {
"type": "PlainText",
"text": "These are the multiplex" + ("es" if len(multi_list) > 1 else "") + " " + outputSpeech + ". Please select one out of these."
# outputSpeech contains the list of options I want the user to select from
},
"shouldEndSession": False,
"directives": [
{
"type": "Dialog.ElicitSlot",
"slotToElicit": "MULTIPLEX",
"updatedIntent": {
"name": "GetMovieDetails",
"confirmationStatus": "NONE",
"slots": {
"CITY" : {
"name" : "CITY",
"confirmationStatus" : "NONE",
"value" : city # this is already filled, it is just anti-capitalised
},
"NAME" : {
"name" : "NAME",
"confirmationStatus" : "NONE",
"value" : movie_name # this is already filled, it is just anti-capitalised
},
"MULTIPLEX" : {
"name" : "MULTIPLEX",
"confirmationStatus" : "NONE",
}
}
}
}
]
}
I'm testing my skill using python-lambda-local, it is working fine on my local machine (I just had to change the dialogState to "COMPLETED" manually, like the one here). It returns everything written above. But It gives an error while testing it on Skill Tester. Here is the output which is returned in the Skill Tester.
PS : I did not check the Slot Filling check box in the Build Section. (As I need the slot to be filled later), and here is the complete code just in case.

Answer 1

Try with omitting the entire "updatedIntent" part, as this information is not required for ElicitSlot.
But more important: You have to make sure that your script returns actual text in JSON-format!
Have a look at http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/1.0/api/#flask.json.jsonify
or https://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html

Answer 2

God, I hate to admit this.
The Dialog.ElicitSlot works fine, and the way I expect it to do so.
The error with my code is, there is no error. I figured my skill was taking some time to fetch data from remote site and doing some calculations on it. So I increased the time out and bam, it worked.
It is always a better to test your skill locally, but it is great to test it once on the aws lambda console. I don't know why I didn't do that earlier.
So to conclude, I just had to increase the timeout in my skill.