Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you’ve probably heard about Amazon’s Alexa. It is a pretty cool cloud-based voice service.

What can you do with Alexa?

I’ve been looking into the technology behind Alexa. At the high level, it’s simple, yet elegant.

I believe Alexa uses SSML; Speech Synthesis Markup Language, when converting Text to Speech (TTS); because she sounds very conversational; rather than a robot reading the text word by word.

Here are a few more technical diagrams of how it works at the high level:

I thought that the developing an Alexa Skill was straight forward and user friendly; especially if you have used any ML/AI tools. Navigation and setup look similar to others.

I created a few new test skills by using existing templates and added new custom intents. It was fun and I can see by a little bit of creativity, some great skills can be added to this fun smart tool!

Please watch my demo down below:

• First skill is a game template where I added new custom intents.
• Second skill is calling a fun external API that returns the number of astronauts currently in space and their names. 🙂 http://api.open-notify.org/astros.json

Another interesting video about “Lessons Learned Growing Alexa” and a few fun capabilities/skills that the Amazon Team discusses.

Bonus point: If you’d like to do a deep dive and create Alexa Skills with serverless backend, this youtube video should help and here are some more technical diagrams from the presentation:

PS: Photos/Graphics are from Amazon.com