【Amazon Echo】 Alexa Skill Development Hands-On

Hello, this is Aimi Nakajima.

On a personal note, I can't think of living without Amazon Echo lately!

Table of Contents

• What is the market for smart speakers? What is the No. 1 share?
• What is an Alexa skill?
• I tried Alexa Seminar & Hands-On
• What is VUI?
• How to create an Alexa skill non-programming
• If you want to start developing Alexa skills

AI Speakers? Or a smart speaker?

To give a rough explanation to first-timers, Amazon Echo is equipped with a voice recognition function called Alexa.

Google also calls it an AI assistant, and each company has a different name for its function.

In addition, there are various theories that the names "AI speaker" and "smart speaker" are mixed, but since only a few elements of AI (artificial intelligence) are still felt, I will call it a smart speaker.

Life with Amazon Echo Dot

Day Highlights with Alexa.

Alexa, Good morning! So, I started by asking you to tell me a little story about the day, Alexa, how is the whether today? and then Alexa**, what's new?** and you read the news, Alexa, I'm going. Alexa, I'm home. And Alexa**, play "fireplace sounds".** **** So, ask Alexa to accompany me to kill time, "night night". So, sleep with healing music

Bold phrases are called wake words, and when you say them, Alexa starts.

The reason why it's English is because I'm using a US account (Amazon.com), and my Alexa is American. Although it is cloud speech recognition, it is not bilingual, so unfortunately I do not understand Japanese.

There is also a theory that Google Home will be able to recognize two languages at the same time soon, so I personally expect Alexa to receive a similar feature update!

What is the market for smart speakers? What is the No. 1 share?

Not only Amazon Echo and Google Home, but also Apple's Home Pad and Microsoft's Cortana (both of which have not yet been released in Japan), etc., not only in the IT community, but also among general consumers are constantly talking about smart speakers these days.

In the United States, the Amazon Echo family is tightening the No. 1 market share. Two years ago, it was almost a one-person victory, but since coming here, Google Home has grown rapidly.

What will happen when Home Pad is added here, and the change in the power map will be interesting in the future.

According to American research firm Arizton, the global smart speaker market is expected to grow to $2.6 billion (293.1 billion yen) in 2019 and $4.8 billion (541.1 billion yen) in 2022.

What is an Alexa Skill

A skill is a function of an app on a smartphone. Except for the default, you can select a skill from the Alexa phone app and activate it to use it on the speaker linked to your account.

Types of Skills

• 1.Custom Skill: General skill
• 2.Smart Home Skills: Skills to control home appliances, etc.
• 3.Flash Briefing Skills: Skills to read out news, etc.

Many skills are 1, and Alexa, night night. at the beginning is a type of custom skill.

Difference Between Country and Account

In addition to Japan, Amozon Echo is currently offered in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and India, and if it is English, it is possible to provide skills not only to the United States but also to the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India with the same source.

In the iPhone App Store, you can switch countries and install apps from other countries on your device, but in the case of Alexa, the functions and skills you can use change when you switch countries.

For example, when you are linked to a Amazon.jp account, you can only use skills that support Japan, while if you switch to a Amazom.com account, you can only use skills that support the United States.

This is a bit disappointing.

I tried Alexa Seminar & Hands-On

The introduction has become long. I want everyone to know the possibilities of Alexa! and held a seminar and hands-on on Alexa skill development for the company!

At ISAO, there is a Tech Lunch (Tech Lunch) where you share new Tech-related knowledge and success and failure stories in actual projects during your lunch break.

We were the first non-engineers to host a Tech Lunch, and a total of about 15 people participated! Mainly infrastructure engineers and back-end engineers, as well as sales and designers.

From a marketer's perspective, I tried to structure the agenda in terms of both the Tech trends I want to follow now and the commercialization.

Agenda

• AI Speaker (Smart Speaker) Market
• Alexa information you want to remember
• Self-made skill demo
• Develop Alexa skills
• VUI design and construction
• Advanced edition (Skill Builder BETA)
• Is Alexa skill development a business?

It's long, so I'll write an excerpt on this blog. If you are interested, please contact us!

What is VUI?

VUI = Voice User Interface, which is a way of communicating with users and devices that is completed by voice, rather than an interface like a traditional website. In addition to smart speakers, robots such as chatbots and Pepper require similar design thinking.

VUI Design Considerations

At the seminar, "Skills that can be installed at the ISAO reception desk and allow customers to learn about ISAO trivia while waitingUnder the plan, we demonstrated the design flow of conversation using a whiteboard.

• Is it a simple wake word for the user?
• Is it a natural conversation?
• Is it considered that users will make unexpected statements?
• Whether Alexa is flowing without interruption on its own.
• Can Alexa emit proper nouns?

There are a number of points to keep in mind when designing, but you should be especially careful when it comes to proper nouns.

If Alexa speaks "ISAO" as it is, the voice will be "ISAO" instead of "ISAO". So, as a result of trial and error, when I texted "E Saw Oh", it became a voice that was familiar to "Isao".

As an advanced technique, Alexa supports SSML, a text-to-speech markup language for English and German, so you can adjust your intonation and make it a whisper-like whisper.

Humans feel that smart speakers are anthropomorphic pets, so it should be a better user experience if there is a change in voice tone rather than a robotic voice.

"Alexa, tell me a story. (Tell me a story)", and he tells a small story in an inflected tone like reading a picture book to a child.

How to Make Alexa Skills Non-Programming

When I started developing my skills with high spirits, I was relieved to see something that worked while watching the official tutorial.

I was able to work with Lambda and have the skills in the tutorial, but I can't write node.js, and in the end, I run into problems that cannot be implemented unless I can program.

Is it natural...

That's when I met a savior called Storyline!

Skill Development with Storyline

Storyline is a web service launched in Belarus in October 2017 with the concept of enabling Alexa skill development without programming.

When I started using it in mid-January 2018, it was not available in Japanese, but in February I was finally able to make it in Japanese.

The UI has also changed from a mind map to a card-type system, and it is now possible to even conditional branching with fewer operations.

You can implement VUI as you imagined.

You can also set up a flow for random utterances or when a user utters something they didn't intend.

The most amazing thing is that it goes all the way to deployment, so you can operate and improve it even after it is released. Great!

Storyline can also do this

All basic usage can be completed with the UI on Storyline, but it can also be used in the following ways.

• Enter multiple utterances in Google Sheets and play them randomly in JSON-formatted interactions
• Insert music files (MP3)
• Regularly update news and read aloud (paid version feature)

I will post the official video.

How to Start Alexa Skill Development

Whether you already have a smart speaker or not, you may be interested in Alexa.

In this blog, we introduced how to develop skills without programming, but programming will be necessary if you actually use it commercially.

With ISAO's Kuramane for AWS, AWS's experienced engineers and UX design experts provide one-stop support for custom skill development.

If you are interested in skill development hands-on, skill development planning design sprints, VUI design workshops, etc., please feel free to contact us.

Thank you for reading to the end!