How To Interact with Alexa – Amazon Alexa Voice Design Guide
About Amazon Alexa
Alexa is an intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon, made popular by the Amazon Echo and the Amazon Echo Dot devices developed by Amazon Lab126. It is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real time information, such as news. Alexa can also control several smart devices using itself as a home automation system.
Most devices with Alexa allow users to activate the device using a wake-word (such as Echo); other devices (such as the Amazon app on iOS or Android) require the user to push a button to activate Alexa’s listening mode.
Alexa Skills Kit
Amazon allows developers to build and publish skills for Alexa using the Alexa Skills Kit. These skills are third-party developed voice experiences that add to the capabilities of any Alexa-enabled device (such as the Echo). These skills are available for free download using the Alexa app. Skills are continuously being added to increase the capabilities available to the user. A “Smart Home Skill API” is available. All of the code runs in the cloud – nothing is on any user’s device. A developer can follow tutorials to learn how to quickly build voice experiences for their new and existing applications.
Alexa Voice Service
Amazon allows device manufacturers to integrate Alexa voice capabilities into their own connected products by using the Alexa Voice Service (AVS), a cloud-based service that provides APIs to interface with Alexa. Products built using AVS have access to Alexa’s growing list of capabilities including all of the Alexa Skills. AVS provides cloud-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). There are no fees for companies looking to integrate Alexa into their products by using AVS.
The voice of Amazon Alexa is generated by a long short-term memory artificial neural network.