Being an AWS Certified can boost your career (increasing your salary, finding better job or getting a promotion) and make your expertise and skills relevant. Hence, there’s no better way to prepare for your exam than getting your hands dirty and build a Serverless Quiz game with and . AWS Certified Developer Associate Alexa Skill AWS Lambda How it works ? Note: all the code is available in my . GitHub 1 - DynamoDB To get started, create a using the : DynamoDB Table AWS CLI I prepared in advance a list of questions for the following : AWS services Next, import the file to the DynamoDB table: JSON The function uses the and method to insert an item into the table: insertToDynamoDB AWS DynamoDB SDK PutItemRequest Execute the following command to import the questions: If you navigate to , you should see that the list of questions has been successfully inserted: DynamoDB Dashboard 2 — Alexa Skill This is what ties it all together, by linking the phrases the user says to interact with the quiz to the . intents For people who are not familiar with . is based on an NLP Engine which is a system that analyses phrases (users messages) and returns an intent. Intents describe what a user want or want to do. It is the intention behind his message. Alexa can learn new intents by attributing examples of messages to an intent. Behind the scenes, the Engine will be able to predict the intent even if he had never seen it before. NLP Alexa So, sign up to , and create a new custom Alexa Skill. Set an invocation name as follows: Amazon Developer Console Create a new for starting the Quiz: Intent Add a new type “ ” to store user choice: Slot Then, create another intent for AWS service choice: And for user’s answer choice: Save your interaction model. Then, you’re ready to configure your . Alexa Skill 3 — Lambda Function The Lambda handler function is self explanatory, it maps each to a code snippet. To keep track of the user’s score. We use Alexa property of the JSON response. The session attributes will then be passed back to you with the next request JSON inside the object. The list of questions is retrieved from using and (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) is used to make speaks a sentence ending in a question mark as a question or add pause in the speech: intent sessionAttributes session’s DynamoDB AWS SDK SSML Alexa Note: Full code is available in my . GitHub Sign in to , and create a new Lambda function in from scratch: AWS Management Console Go Assign the following role to the function: IAM Generate the deployment package, and upload it to the Lambda Console and set the environment variable to the table name: TABLE_NAME 4 — Testing Now that you have created the function and put its code in place, it’s time to specify how it gets called. We’ll do this by linking the to : LambdaARN Alexa Skill Once the information is in place, click . You’re ready to start testing your new Alexa Skill ! Save Endpoints To test, you need to login to , and enable the “ ” switch on your skill from the “ ” Tab: Alexa Developer Console Test Test Or use an Alexa enabled device like , by saying “ ” : Amazon Echo Alexa, Open AWS Developer Quiz
