Wouldn’t it be cool to have Alexa answer about your business?
To get your business on Alexa, you need to build custom Alexa Skill and publish it. Sounds bit techy but you can do it with simple efforts and without approaching Alexa skill development company.
In this tutorial, we will provide you with sample skill and all the steps (right from sign up) to publish your own Alexa Skill which will provide information about your business to users.
Download Business Information Alexa skill
First of all you need to download the sample skill that we have developed. Using this sample skill you can create your own alexa skill without coding!
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To download the files go to our blog and fill up the download form.
Amazon Signup
To start using Amazon Alexa you need to have an Amazon Account. If you are already using Amazon, then you can login using that account or you can create a new Amazon account.
After sign in you can see Amazon developer services and technologies. Select amazon Alexa you will redirect to the Amazon Alexa page. You can see the Alexa skills kit page.
Skill Creation
Select the Alexa Skills Kit menu under Skill Builders.
Click on Get Started button to enter into the Alexa developer console.
Click on Sign in here link to go on Alexa developer console page.
Click on Create Skill Button to create a new Alexa skill.
Provide skill name for your skill and select default language. Choose a model to add to your skill. Here we have selected Custom model. Then choose a method to host your skill’s backend resources. We have selected Alexa-Hosted Python.
Click on Create Skill button to move on a further step.
Alexa developer console provides some default templates to use them in your skill. Select Hello World template and click on choose button.
It will take a bit to create your Alexa hosted skill. After a successful build, you can see the left sidebar with four built-in intents, one Hello world intent, and JSON Editor.
Your Skill is created. Now you have to import downloaded JSON into your skill.
How to import downloaded files ?
To import downloaded JSON click on the JSON Editor menu on the left sidebar. You will redirect to the JSON Editor page.
Drag and Drop downloaded JSON (businessinformation.json) to import it in your skill.
Click on Save Model Button to save it.
Then click on the Build Model button to build your skill.
After a successful build, you can see all your imported intents in the left sidebar under the Intents menu.
Now We are using python lambda function for error handling and custom fallback response.
To add python script, copy code from downloaded python script (businessinformation.py) and replace it into lambda_function.py file.
Now click on Save button to save and then Deploy button to deploy your code.
You can test your skill in the Alexa simulator. To test your skill, you need to enable testing in Development mode. As shown in the above screen In Alexa Simulator tab type open ‘your invocation name’ to invoke your skill.
Now your skill is working. You can modify responses as per your requirement.
To modify responses, Go to Build tab and open WelcomeIntent from Intents on the left sidebar.
You can change/add Sample Utterances as per your requirement. Scroll down to change/add responses as per your requirement.
Similar to welcome intent open all other intent and modify default information with your business information.
Once all the changes are done, you can proceed to submit your skill to publish and make it available globally.
If you have any question or doubt then feel free to post them in comment. We’ll be glad to help you out.
You can also contact us for Alexa Skill Development services. Get in touch with us at letstalk@pragnakalp.com to discuss about your chatbot development requirement.
