TV Guide Skill for Amazon Echo using an AWS Lambda function

A simple AWS Lambda function that demonstrates how to write a skill for the Amazon Echo using the Alexa SDK.

Concepts

This sample shows how to create a Lambda function for handling Alexa Skill requests that:

• Web service: communicate with an external web service to get TV guide data from the TVmaze
• Dialog and Session state: Handles two models, both a one-shot ask and tell model, and a multi-turn dialog model. If the user provides an incorrect slot in a one-shot model, it will direct to the dialog model. See the examples section for sample interactions of these models.

Setup

To run this example skill you need to do two things. The first is to deploy the example code in lambda, and the second is to configure the Alexa skill to use Lambda.

AWS Lambda Setup

1. Go to the AWS Console and click on the Lambda link. Note: ensure you are in us-east or you won't be able to use Alexa with Lambda.
2. Click on the Create a Lambda Function or Get Started Now button.
3. Skip the blueprint
4. Name the Lambda Function "TV-Guide-Skill".
5. Select the runtime as Node.js
6. Go to the the src directory, select all files and then create a zip file, make sure the zip file does not contain the src directory itself, otherwise Lambda function will not work.
7. Select Code entry type as "Upload a .ZIP file" and then upload the .zip file to the Lambda
8. Keep the Handler as index.handler (this refers to the main js file in the zip).
9. Create a basic execution role and click create.
10. Leave the Advanced settings as the defaults.
11. Click "Next" and review the settings then click "Create Function"
12. Click the "Event Sources" tab and select "Add event source"
13. Set the Event Source type as Alexa Skills kit and Enable it now. Click Submit.
14. Copy the ARN from the top right to be used later in the Alexa Skill Setup.

Alexa Skill Setup

1. Go to the Alexa Console and click Add a New Skill.
2. Set "TV Guide" for the skill name and "TV guide" as the invocation name, this is what is used to activate your skill. For example you would say: "Alexa, Ask TV Guide when Watchdog is next on."
3. Select the Lambda ARN for the skill Endpoint and paste the ARN copied from above. Click Next.
4. Copy the custom slot types from the customSlotTypes folder. Each file in the folder represents a new custom slot type. The name of the file is the name of the custom slot type, and the values in the file are the values for the custom slot.
5. Copy the Intent Schema from the included IntentSchema.json.
6. Copy the Sample Utterances from the included SampleUtterances.txt. Click Next.
7. [optional] go back to the skill Information tab and copy the appId. Paste the appId into the index.js file for the variable APP_ID, then update the lambda source zip file with this change and upload to lambda again, this step makes sure the lambda function only serves request from authorized source.
8. You are now able to start testing your sample skill! You should be able to go to the Echo webpage and see your skill enabled.
9. In order to test it, try to say some of the Sample Utterances from the Examples section below.
10. Your skill is now saved and once you are finished testing you can continue to publish your skill.

Examples

Example user interactions:

One-shot model:

User:  "Alexa, ask TV Guide when Strictly Come Dancing is next on?"
Alexa: "Strictly Come Dancing is scheduled for 7:10 pm on Saturday, 26th November 2016."

User:  "Alexa, ask TV Guide when The Great British Bake Off is next on?"
Alexa: "The Great British Bake Off has no more programs scheduled."

Dialog model:

User:  "Alexa, open TV Guide"
Alexa: "Welcome to TV Guide. Which show would you like schedule information for?"
User:  "Watchdog"
Alexa: "Watchdog is scheduled for 8:00 pm on Wednesday, 30th November 2016."