Slot Value Alexa
2.2 Add slot values. You can add as many as you think are necessary. For recommendations on custom slot values please check, best practices for sample utterances. 2.3 Go back to the general view of the ADCINTENT, scroll down and we will add how the slot will be included in the utterances. New customers only. Minimum deposit alexa slot values £20, maximum bonus £200. Wager 40x before withdrawing. Game weighting applies. Max bonus betting limit – slots: £5, other games: 10% of bonus amount.
Amazon have released a fabulous new update to the way Alexa works. If a user makes a request without a skill name and Alexa can’t handle it, machine learning kicks in and some of the most likely skills to handle it are sent a new kind of request asking if they could handle it. Based on the responses from those skills the most appropriate can then be used to handle the request. This post is showing you how to enable your skill to take advantage of this new functionality with the latest Alexa.NET.
For more details you can always check out the Alexa blog article
A custom slot type is not the equivalent of an enumeration. Values outside the list may still be returned if recognized by the spoken language understanding system. Although input to a custom slot type is weighted towards the values in the list, it is not constrained to just the items on the list.
This feature is currently in Beta with Amazon & Alexa, and as it alters the structure of the core response object – I felt the change required a beta of Alexa.NET until we’re sure of the changes. To that end, this post was written after we released Alexa.NET v1.5.5-pre and will hopefully be updated once the feature comes out of Beta
The new request type
So to allow for this new skill discovery process, your skill will receive a new request, of type CanFulfillIntentRequest. The request structure is pretty much the same as an intent request, with all the usual information.
This is on purpose, as Amazon want this extra set of data to require as little alteration as possible to your existing skill code (it’s that code that made them pick your skill a a candidate after all!)
Depending on the logic you could handle the same thing with similar logic.
Adding fulfillment information to your response
So you’ve checked the intent data, you know if you can handle it or not – how do you let Amazon know?
Fulfillment is expressed by use of a new property against the response body, alongside card and output, CanFulfillIntent. This describes whether or not your skill can handle the information, were it sent as part of a real request. The final response in the JSON looks like this
{
'canFulfill': 'YES',
'slots': {
'slotName': {
'canUnderstand': 'YES',
'canFulfill': 'NO'
}
}
}
CanFulfill
This is your confidence on whether or not you can actually handle this request.
– Yes: Totally, not a problem, it’s an intent I understand and all the slots make sense
– Maybe: I get it, it’s an intent I get, but maybe the customer would need to answer some more questions, link their account, do some more work to really know.
– No: No idea what you’re talking about, why are we still talking?
Slots
Each slot has an entry as well, which you can optionally fill in to show what you can and can’t handle:
– canUnderstand: The confidence your skill has about understanding the slot value. It’s a yes/no/maybe situation, but there are a lot of specific rules on this one, so I’d recommend checking out the docs
– canFulfill: Just because your skill understands the value, doesn’t mean you can deal with it. So this is a yes/no value that says whether or not you can do something with the value to fulfill the intent.
So you send this response, using code like the following:
and then Amazon can decide whether or not to use your skill for the real request (yeah, I’m going to try and write a Pull Request to tidy that up a bit, but you see how it maps – right?)
I think this a great move and should allow well crafted skills to gain more traction by themselves.
The Question :
I know that some skills can capture spoken text, such as when adding to to-do lists and shopping lists, and third party skills can also do this, eg. SMS with Molly.
So, how do they do this? Is there an API call that captures the recognized text and stores it somewhere?
The Answer 1
Custom skills can capture text and send them to your Skill’s API.
If you’re not completely familiar with how Alexa Skills work, here’s a brief summary:
First, you register your Skill with Amazon, providing an intent schema and sample utterances. The intent schema defines which actions can be performed, and the slots for custom data to be sent to your API. The sample utterances provide examples of how a user can trigger each intent.
When the user activates your Skill, Alexa will try to match what they said to one of your skill’s sample utterances. If it does match, it will send an HTTPS request to your server to ask for a response.
Your server provides a response (if all goes well) and then Alexa will give feedback to the user who triggered your skill.
The AMAZON.LITERAL slot allows you to accept virtually any input. Note that currently it is only supported in the English (US) region—English (UK) and German skills cannot use AMAZON.LITERAL.
Your intent schema might look like this:
And your sample utterances might be like this:
Get Slot Value Alexa Python
When using AMAZON.LITERAL, you need to provide lots of sample utterances—at least one sample for each possible length of input, but ideally more. The Amazon documentation suggests that you should be aiming for hundreds of samples for slots where you could accept various types of inputs.
It does seem a little tedious, but if you don’t do this, it’s unlikely that your skill will recognise text well. You could perhaps generate sample utterances from customer data (so long as personal information is removed beforehand!) so that the most common utterances are in your samples—I suspect Alexa will be slightly biased towards recognising utterances similar to the samples.
Amazon discourage AMAZON.LITERAL slots though, and would prefer you to use custom slot types, which require you to list the possible inputs. It’s important to remember that:
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A custom slot type is not the equivalent of an enumeration. Values outside the list may still be returned if recognized by the spoken language understanding system. Although input to a custom slot type is weighted towards the values in the list, it is not constrained to just the items on the list. Your code still needs to include validation and error checking when using slot values.