Tinkering: Amazon Echo Skills

Data science technologies and techniques are always rapidly changing. Therefore, it's paramount for a data scientist to be comfortable with tinkering with new things. This motivates me in my personal life to welcome environments in which I tinker with things I am unfamiliar with, including things like home DIY repairs and craftsman work. So far, that's been going pretty well for me.

So I’ve had an Amazon Echo for a while now, and I’ve always wondered what it took to code a skill for Alexa yourself – the potential for so much ease of access to information while sprawled on the living room couch was so enticing. So I looked at some guides, and took a stab at it, and while it was more complicated than I had expected, it wasn’t that hard!

For my first Alexa skill, my wife’s birthday was coming up, so I decided to surprise her with a simple skill that would randomly select and relay to the speaker from a repository of facts about our relationship, like where our first date was, when we got married, little quirks here and there, etc.

You actually need an account with Amazon Developer Portal, as well as an account with Amazon Web Services, since Alexa will be communicating back and forth between the two.

First, you work on the invocation of the skill in the developer portal:

Next, you work on the code that goes on in AWS when the Echo pings your skill:

You test the skill:

Point the invocation to the proper ARN (Amazon Resource Name, a unique identifier for your AWS program.

And then you can take the steps to get it published. Since this skill only talks about things that my wife and I would care about, I elected to just keep it in the testing phase, so that it just works with our Amazon Echo.

Including setting up my accounts, reading guides, etc, this project took me about 4 hours to do. I spent 5% of the time coding, 55% of the time figuring out how to set up everything so that they all work together successfully, and 40% of the time coming up with cute relationship facts that my wife would laugh at. All in all, it was a good time, and my wife still likes to invoke the skill at random times.