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about 7 years ago

Tech Tip: Wanna create an Amazon Alexa chatbot?

It’s easy to create a chatbot using Amazon Lex. This service allows you to build conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are available, enabling you to easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots or “chatbots”. Best of all, you do not need to have machine learning expertise in order to use Amazon Lex. You can specify the conversation flow and Amazon Lex will take care of the speech recognition and natural language understanding functionality!  

To create a bot, you will first define the actions performed by the bot. These actions are the intents that need to be fulfilled by the bot. For each intent, you will add sample utterances and slots. Utterances are phrases that invoke the intent. Slots are input data required to fulfill the intent. Lastly, you will provide the business logic necessary to execute the action. 

Export your Amazon Lex chatbot schema as a JSON file into the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) to simplify the process of creating an Alexa skill. Once you add the bot schema file into ASK, you can build an Alexa Skill with it. The JSON configuration file contains the structure of your Amazon Lex chatbot, including the intent schema with utterances, slots, prompts and slot-types.

If you are a first-time user of Amazon Lex, simply sign into the AWS Management Console and navigate to “Lex” under the “Artificial Intelligence” category. You must have an Amazon Web Services account to start using Amazon Lex. If you do not already have one, you will be prompted to create one during the sign-up process. We recommend that you read:

  1. Getting Started with Amazon Lex– In this section, you set up your account and test Amazon Lex.
  2. API Reference– This section provides additional examples that you can use to explore Amazon Lex.

For step-by-step instructions on exporting your chatbot from Amazon Lex, visit the Amazon Lex documentation and FAQs page for more details. For more information about creating an Alexa skill, and earning your Alexa Badge, check out the Alexa Skills Badge from AWS Educate.  

 

Questions?

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