Create an Alexa skill with serverless and a conversation

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An article by Niklas Heidloff and Mark Sturdevant on hot Alexa skills topic. In it you will find how to create an Alexa skill with serverless and a conversation. Apart from Alexa you will also use Watson to discuss the weather, build a conversation, or choose one from a library.

Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM’s DeepQA project.

In the article you will create an Alexa skill using Watson™ Assistant via the Apache OpenWhisk serverless framework. An example conversation is included to demonstrate how to pass context between different intents, resulting in a weather lookup.

To remember the conversation state and be able to request external actions, authors chose Redis to save the state across invocations of serverless functions, and they built an external action that retrieves the weather forecast.

When you complete this pattern, you will understand how to:

  • Create an OpenWhisk action in the IBM Cloud Functions serverless platform
  • Use Redis to store a session’s conversation context across events
  • Import a conversation from the BAE or a JSON file
  • Invoke a conversation with Watson using Node.js
  • Use The Weather Channel data service to look up locations and forecasts
  • Create an Alexa skill to reach tens of millions of customers

Flow chart, video demonstration and open source code in GitHub repository for all systems included. Amazing!

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Tags javascript serverless ibm bots miscellaneous nosql