Alexa Live notes

My notes about some sessions from Alexa Live 2019 conference. All info here

How to shift from screen-first to voice-first design

• Principles
  • Be adaptable
    • Use lots of utterances and variations
    • Slots and synonymous
  • Be personal
    • Remember user information
    • Context & Situation
    • Think on retention
  • Be relatable
    • Be concise and straight to the point
    • In-skill purchases
  • Be available
    • Voice is everywhere
    • Take the initiative & lead the conversation
    • Don't try to convert a flow chart experience, categories and so on to a voice-fist experience
• Design artefacts in a canvas - Storyboard (Adobe XD and Amazon templates)
  • Happy path
  • What happens when an user return to your skill
  • Alexa should remember previous information
  • Living documentation

Tailor your Alexa skill responses to deliver truly personal experiences (dev blog post)

The goal is to hide the technology behind the experience and being natural

• Personal Experience
  • Answer any question only once
  • Preferences should become defaults
  • Context is kept thought sessions
  • Language should feel natural
  • Users feels their experience is unique
• How would you create a personal experience in Alexa?
  • Memory
    • Session Attributes
    • Example: Different error messages depending on an error counter
    • Persistent Attributes
    • User information
    • Time Zones & Measurements
    • Customer Profile API
    • Account Linking
  • Variety
    • Randomization
    • Contextualization
    • Language adaptation
    • Localization & I18n
  • Localization

How to build your first great Alexa skill

• Technologies provided by Alexa
  • Speech recognition
  • Machine Learning
  • Natural Language Understanding
  • Text to Speech
• Understanding the SDK
  • Handlers
• Turn-by-turn conversation
  • Ask Follow-up questions
  • Auto-delegation
• Memory
• Amazon API > Settings API

Alexa Skill Developer Tools: Build better skills faster

• Design
  • Core values
    • Unconstrained user input
    • Sequential presentation
    • Ephemeral data
    • Text input is easy
  • Principles
    • Be adaptable
    • In grammar vs out of grammar
    • Be contextual
    • Be careful with random answers
    • Session attributes
    • Be available
    • Wide top level UI, not nested menus
• Build
  • SMAPI
  • ASK CLI
  • VS Code integration
  • AWS CodeStar
• Test
  • Test events for Lambda code using JSON from simulator
  • Beta testing
    • Pulselabs
• Launch
  • Analytics
    • Interaction Path

Best practices for testing your Alexa Skills (dev blog post)

• Bespoken

All code is guilty until proven innocent

• Automation FTW
• Types of testing
  • Unit testing
  • E2E
  • Continuous testing & monitoring
  • Usability performance testing

How to write great dialogs for Alexa Skills (dev blog post)

• Situational design
• Brevity is King
• Storyboard (Amazon templates for Adobe XD)
  • Start with your happy path
• Be adaptable
• Be brief
• Handle confirmations
  • Implicit vs Explicit
• Avoid voice menus
• Error recovery > try to prevent errors in the first place!
• Contextual errors
• When to say sorry
• Voice quality
  • SSML, punctuations & grammar rules
  • Split personality