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Alexa

AWS Certification Prep: Alexa Skill Builder

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Advanced content levelAdvanced

Begin your journey toward becoming an AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder

Voice-driven AI experiences are finally becoming a reality, revolutionizing the way individuals interact with technology and making everyday tasks more seamless and frictionless. Amazon’s Alexa cloud service, which powers millions of Echo devices, is at the forefront of this technology wave. There are currently over 100,000 Alexa skills that enable customers to voice-control their world, whether it's listening to music hands free, controlling their smart home devices, setting timers in the kitchen, listening to the news, or even ordering a pizza. Many companies are starting to invest in voice-first technology and are now looking for professionals who understand how to build, test, certify, and publish Amazon Alexa skills.

Join expert Ashish Jha to dive into the Alexa skill building lifecycle and prepare for the AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty exam. You’ll learn the major components of building, testing, certifying, and publishing Amazon Alexa skills and get the hands-on experience and know-how you’ll need to become an AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:

  • The roles and responsibilities of an Alexa skill builder through the complete lifecycle (development, testing and troubleshooting, certifying, and publishing)
  • The AI technologies behind Alexa
  • The core concepts and domain being tested by the AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder - Specialty exam
  • The basic building blocks of Alexa skill development

And you’ll be able to:

  • Effectively prepare for the AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty certification
  • Identify gaps in your own knowledge and exam topics that you may not have encountered on your AWS journey
  • Design conversational experiences using common voice-first design pattern
  • Identify things to look out for when certifying your Alexa skills and publishing them to the Alexa Skills Store

This live event is for you because...

  • You want to prepare for the AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty exam.
  • You’re a designer or a developer currently using your technical expertise to build Alexa skills.
  • You’re a JavaScript developer who wants to build Alexa skills backed by Amazon Web Services and certify and publish Alexa skills to the Alexa Skills Store.
  • You’re a technical manager or someone involved with quality assurance, operations, or product or project management, and you want to orient yourself with voice-first technology.

Prerequisites

  • An AWS account (free tier)
  • An Alexa Developer Console account
  • A computer with Node.js installed and set up for local development
  • A basic understanding of Node.js and AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, S3, etc.) (useful but not required)
  • An Amazon Echo device connected to the email used for the Alexa Developer Console (useful but not required)
  • No prior experience building Alexa skills required

Recommended preparation:

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

AWS Alexa Skill Builder specialty exam overview (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Amazon Echo, Alexa, and the tools used to build Alexa skills; the AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder exam
  • Q&A

Skill building basics (45 minutes)

  • Presentation: Utterances, intents, and slots; the skill creation process; navigating the Alexa Developer Console; handling requests with Alexa-hosted skills for Node.js
  • Hands-on exercise: Build your first skill
  • Q&A

Break (5 minutes)

Skill design (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: The principles of voice design; best practices for engaging skills; using Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) and Polly voices
  • Q&A

Skill building advanced (55 minutes)

  • Presentation: AWS services used for extending skill functionality
  • Hands-on exercises: Handle requests with self-provisioned Lambda and Node.js; implement remembering with session attributes; add long-term memory with persistent attributes in DynamoDB; test and troubleshoot with CloudWatch
  • Q&A

Break (5 minutes)

Enhancing the skill experience (35 minutes)

  • Presentation: Testing tools and the Analytics Dashboard; publishing, operations, and lifecycle management
  • Hands-on exercises: Use multiturn dialogs; implement intent and slot confirmations; implement slot filling and validation
  • Q&A

New features and APIs (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Alexa’s newest features and APIs; additional skill types; exam strategy

Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)

Your Instructor

  • Ashish Jha

    Ashish Jha is an AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder, an Alexa Hackathon Winner, and a Consultant VUI Developer, who has experience working with Alexa agencies and voice-tech product start-ups based globally. He has built more than 250 Alexa Skills, Actions on Google, and Bixby Capsules for both small and medium scale businesses as well as big brands and artists.

    Ashish is also the winner of the Alexa Community Evangelist of the Year Award (2018 and 2019), and he leads the Alexa Community Delhi monthly meetups, hands-on workshops, and events for students and professional developers.

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