Company
Date Published
Author
Nicholas Laing
Word count
682
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Creating an interaction model for an Alexa Skill involves setting up a natural language understanding (NLU) system, such as Microsoft LUIS, to recognize and interpret user inputs. To do this, one must create an Azure Cognitive Services account, which includes a Natural Language Understanding Service within Cognitive Services on the Azure Portal. The endpoint from this service is then used to interact with MS LUIS. Once the MS LUIS app is created, it can be trained and published to Staging, allowing for integration with Alexa Skills. A Lambda written Node.js code uses the @azure/cognitiveservices-luis-runtime package to manage requests from an OrderIntent handler, which retrieves values from a SearchQuery slot and sends them to MS LUIS for prediction. The result is managed by an intentDispatcher, completing the integration of external NLP into Alexa Skills.