Create a Custom Alexa Skill, Part 1 (“Hello Zoo!”)

This tutorial is first in the Quick & Dirty series for developing a custom Alexa skill called My Zoo.

Estimated time: 5-10 minutes
No programming experience necessary

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Overview

With this tutorial, you’ll create the bare bones of a custom Alexa skill with a customized welcome message using the Alexa Developer Console (ADC).

Little by little, as you progress through this My Zoo tutorial series, you’ll add features to make the skill more engaging and fun. Now, it’s time to dive right in and experience the joy of creating something that really works!

Prerequisites

• an Amazon Developer account, click here to create one (it’s free)

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Step 2: Update invocation

An Alexa invocation is the word or phrase used to trigger a custom skill.

1. Click Invocation Name box, in the right column of the build screen.

2. Set Skill Invocation Name = my zoo

3. Click Save Model.
4. Click Build Model (may take a minute to complete).

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Step 3: Test

Let’s see what the bare-bones build did.

1. Click Test on the top menu bar.
2. Under the top menu, you’ll see “Test is disabled for this skill.” with a drop-down list next to it. Choose Development.

3. Enter open my zoo (or, just my zoo) in the field with the mic icon.

4. You should see/hear the default Alexa “Welcome” message:

Where does this ‘Welcome…’ message come from?

With a bare-bones custom Alexa skill, the first thing Alexa does is invoke a “Launch Request” intent. We’ll be discussing intents more in the next post of this series.

For now, let’s customize the Welcome message.

Step 4: Customize the “Welcome” message

1. Click Code on the top menu bar.
2. You should see a bunch of code in the editor on the right part of your screen. Find this line:
   class LaunchRequestHandler(AbstractRequestHandler)
3. About 8 lines down from there, find this line:
   speak_output = "Welcome, you can say Hello or Help. Which would you like to try?"
   This is the message that Alexa speaks when you invoke My Zoo.
4. Change the welcome message inside the double quotes. For example:

speak_output = "Welcome to My Zoo, I make animal sounds!"

5. Click Save button near top-right of screen.
6. Click Deploy to make the changes take affect. This may take a minute.
7. Test, as you did in Step 3.c:

That’s it, you’re done!

Conclusion

Congratulations, you’ve created a custom Alexa skill! The world is now your oyster!

The next step is to get Alexa to prompt for the name of an animal and respond with the appropriate animal “sound”, by adding Intents. Continue to Create a Custom Alexa Skill, Part 2 (Intents, Utterances, Slots).

As always, thank you for visiting my blog. If you have corrections or suggestions for this tutorial series, please add a comment below.

Related Resources

Tutorial: Build an Engaging Alexa Skill