At the London App Brewery, we’re always on the look out for new frontiers in technology. The most convincing of late has got to be Voice-User-Interfaces (VUI). We think the days of staring at a screen in dinner dates and being glued to your mobile phone are numbered. What better way of introducing our students to VUI than to collaborate with the Amazon Alexa team?
On a balmy, Wednesday afternoon (highly unusual for London), we had over 200 App Brewers fill up the auditorium at Code Node – one of the most beautiful event spaces in London.
We were joined by Sébastien Stormacq and David Low from the Amazon Alexa team who were kind enough to introduce our community to the incredible things you can do with the Alexa Voice Service. and showed how easy it was to create an Alexa skill for the Echo on the spot.
For those who don’t know, the Amazon Echo is the world’s most successful AI-powered speaker. Alexa is the voice service that powers the Amazon Echo and Alexa apps.
The Alexa Voice Service provides capabilities, or skills, that enable users to interact with apps using their voice. Examples of these skills include the ability to play music, answer general questions, set an alarm, provide information on the weather and more.
At the App Brewery, we’ve also been looking into the Alexa documentation and have been playing around with creating our very own Alexa skills. Here are some of the most notable things we learnt on the day.
SSML
You can use Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to instruct Alexa on how she should enounce her replies. e.g. you can use “whispered” to get Alexa to act like she’s got something to hide.
<speak>
I want to tell you a secret.
<amazon:effect name="whispered">I am not a real human.</amazon:effect>.
Can you believe it?
</speak>
Creating Natural Conversations
The hardest part about programming a good Alexa skill is not the code. Instead, it’s keeping the language sounding natural and making Alexa respond in a conversational way.
A great example Sébastien gave was automated telephone answering services. You know the ones that ask you to “Press 1 for the billing department. Press 2 for customer services and press 3 to speak to a human”.
These types of switch statement phone lines cause endless amounts of frustration and clearly does not provide a good user experience. In my opinion any Alexa reply that requires a non-binary choice need to be rethought.
We are now looking forward to the next installment in our partnership with the Alexa development team: a half day Alexa skill programming workshop at the Amazon UK headquarters. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, hurry, as we saw over 100 signups in the first 24 hours after making it go live.
About The App Brewery
The App Brewery is a leading tech education company. We enable people from non-technical backgrounds to quickly understand and get up to speed with the latest frontiers in technology. While we provide a whole range of bespoke corporate educational events, we also invest back into our community with our public courses on programming, design and digital marketing. Join one of our events today or contact us to find out more.