Amazon Alexa Workshop

Today I was lucky enough to join an Amazon Alexa workshop in Newcastle ran by Jamie Grossman and Andrea Muttoni from Amazon AlexaDevs, covering some great topics including Render Templates, state and session management, Alexa Voice Profiles, Alexa for Business, localisation and the long awaited notifications (we may be waiting a little longer for this…. 🙂 ) As usual I had my two tech buddies with me Carl Cheel and Che Armstrong!

Very interesting Amazon Alexa developer event at the Jurys Inn Newcastle

Interesting facts from the event

• There are only around 30,000+ Alexa skills worldwide.. meaning a great time to start developing apps that can drive financial rewards for developers!
• If you publish a skill you will at the very least get a very cool hoody, or possibly an Amazon Echo Dot or Amazon Echo
• Apps that drive the highest customer engagement can bring financial rewards to developers; up to 5 digits per month! Earn Money with Alexa Developer Rewards
• Developers with a published Alexa skill can apply to receive a $100 AWS promotional credit and can also receive an additional $100 per month in AWS promotional credits if they incur AWS usage charges for their skill, making it free for developers to build and host most Alexa skills.

Interesting developer links from the event

• Skillinator.io allows you to quickly generate boilerplate code for AWS Lambda to use with your Alexa skill.
• The Alexa Cookbook has some great skill examples which can be used for hackathons, workshops and training.
• The Alexa Voice Design Guide is a guide for developers wishing to create skills that can be used on existing hardware as well as the new Echo Show and Echo Spot.
• The ASK Command Line Interface (ASK CLI) is a tool for you to manage your Alexa skills and related AWS Lambda functions. With ASK CLI, you have access to the Skill Management API, which allows you to manage Alexa skills programmatically from the command line.
• Alexa for Business lets you add voice to your products and services so you can provide rich, personalised voice experiences for your customers. Alexa could help your hotel guests order room service and control lights and temperature for example; allowing customers to interact with existing services and products in a new and exciting way.

…OK… now time to have some fun coding 😉