Tips Tricks and Insights

This is the companion wiki to the 2017 AWS re:Invent chalk talk: ALX327 - Alexa Smart Home

Chalk talk abstract: Explore how to build Alexa Smart Home skills for smart devices so you can delight your customers with voice control, routines, and responsive experiences that work across multiple locales. In this session, learn the developer resources available to you today so you can ship a high quality skill quickly and effortlessly. Plenty of tips, tricks, and insights from Alexa Smart Home experts and an experienced Honeywell API evangelist.

Anatomy of a smart home skill

• Understand how smart home skills work
• ALX316 - How to Build a Backend for an Alexa Smart Home Skill -- this session will provide insight on how to build a profressional-grade backend to support your smart home skill

Why build a smart home skill?

• Delightful, natural voice user experience
• Alexa takes care of speech across [all locales]((https://developer.amazon.com/docs/smarthome/develop-smart-home-skills-in-multiple-languages.html); you just take care of the device
• Integration with Alexa multi-modal experiences for free, for example: GUI, routines
• Leverages your existing services through standard tech, for example: Lambda, OAuth
• Constantly evolving capabilities and support for new IoT devices
• Eligible for the Works with Amazon Alexa (WWAA) program

Build a skill in 5 minutes

• More like 15 minutes if you’re starting from scratch
• Use guide in GitHub
• For this chalk talk, we’ll just walk through the five easy steps with an already created skill

1. Set up Login with Amazon (LWA)
2. Create the skill
3. Create the Lambda function
4. Configure the skill
5. Test directives and proactive state updates

Lambda best practices

• Use Lambda versioning and aliases
• Watch out for limits

About monitoring

• Use Amazon CloudWatch and open source tools, e.g. awslogs

Migrating from v2

• Look at the example Lambda in our GitHub and also check our migration guide

It’s all about state

• Handle ReportState directives with as much state info as possible
• Proactive State Updates (PSU) or ChangeReports mean less traffic to your Lambda

Tips about device discovery

• Don’t forget the “Alexa” interface for each endpoint
• Double check capability versions
• Use the right display category for your device; this affects how the Alexa App displays your device
• For easy debugging and save lookups on your side, store useful data in the cookie property

Send correct messages

• Validation Schemas, use them!
• Use online validators for quick testing, e.g. JSON Schema Lint
• Enable runtime validation for both Lambda and async messages, e.g. JSON Schema Libraries

Multi-language support

• Use the Skill Management API to easily update multi-region skills

Test, submit, publish, repeat

• Review the publishing guide