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Build An Alexa Quiz Game Skill

Voice User InterfaceLambda FunctionConnect VUI to CodeTestingCustomizationPublication

Customize the Skill to be Yours

At this point, you should have a working copy of our United States Quiz Game skill. In order to make it your own, you will need to customize it with data and responses that you create. Here are the things you will need to change:

  1. New data. You will need to create a new dataset for your skill that isn't the 50 United States of America. If you are looking for an idea, check out the Wikipedia List of Lists of Lists.

    1. Edit the java source files. You can find a copy here on GitHub. You could use a lightweight code editor like Atom, or Sublime Text to edit the code and use Maven to build it. But you most likely will want to use an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA, independent of your IDE choice, you'll have to use Maven to build a JAR and upload your code for your changes to take effect.s

    2. Search for the places where data is referenced. This is the data for our skill. You can see that there is a row for each state, represented by five data values: StateName, Abbreviation, Capital, StatehoodYear, and StatehoodOrder.

      You can provide as few or as many properties for your data as you would like, but we recommend a minimum of three to keep your skill interesting. (Two is the fewest that will make any sense for a quiz.) You should provide at least 25 rows of data for your quiz by replacing the data that we provided with your content. To see other examples of appropriate data structures for a quiz game skill, we have created a few sample data sets for you to look at.

    3. Consider using built-in slot values. We recommend considering data from the built-in slot values provided by Amazon. You still need to build your entire dataset, but using values from the built-in slots will make your work in the next few steps easier. We have provided a few examples below, but you can see the entire list of built-in slot values here.

      Slot Name Description Sample Values Supported Languages
      AMAZON.Actor Names of actors and actresses Alan Rickman, Amy Adams, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson US
      AMAZON.Airline Name of a variety of airlines Alaska Airlines, British Airways, Dolphin Air, Maestro US
      AMAZON.Animal Names of many different animals blister beetle, common frog, moray eel, opossum, spider monkey US
      AMAZON.Comic Titles of comic books Justice League, Runaways, The Amazing Spiderman, Watchmen, X-Men US
      AMAZON.EUROPE_CITY European and world cities Kempten, Lourdes, Paris, London, Barcelona US, UK, DE
      AMAZON.Sport Names of sports basketball, college football, football, gymnastics, team handball US
      AMAZON.VideoGame Titles of video games Doom Two, Lemmings, The Sims, Worms US

    4. Once you have your data, here are a couple of tips to remember as we move forward:

      • Alexa will read your property names, so each property name should be readable in your questions. These names are also used in cards in the Alexa app, so you should capitalize the first letter of each word. The skill will automatically separate words and add spaces as necessary.
      • The first property in each item is typically used in the questions. For example, in the U.S state data, most of the questions take a form like "What is the capital of Ohio?", where "capital" came from the property name, and "Ohio" was the first property. (You can customize this for your skill.) Otherwise, the order does not matter at all.

    5. When you have replaced the data in index.js, copy the contents of your file to your Lambda function. This should be as simple as copying the text, and pasting it into the code box for your Lambda.

  2. New Interaction Model for your AnswerIntent. If your data is changing, then the type of data you receive from your users must change as well.

    1. Open your skill in the Developer Portal, and go to the Skill Builder Beta.

    2. Update the slot values for AnswerIntent In our original Interaction Model, we defined a slot for each property in our data, and they had the exact same names as the properties of our data. You should do the same with your intent schema.

      Tips for Your Intent Customization

      • Make sure you have a slot for every property in your data.
      • Use built-in slot values when possible. This will generally make your life easier, but if you need a custom slot, they're easy to make. You should have noticed that we created one custom slot for our U.S. states quiz for US state abbreviations.

    3. Create any new custom slots you need. You will need a custom slot for every data value that you can't use a built-in slot value for. While a custom slot doesn't need to be every possible value, it certainly helps to make the list as representative of your expected data as possible.

    4. Update your sample utterances. There is a sample utterance for AnswerIntent for each data type we created. You need to update this list of utterances to represent your data structure instead.

      • **Remember that if you are creating this skill for another language other than English, your sample utterances need to be written in that language, not English.

    5. Click the "Save" button when you have completed.

  3. New sentences to respond to your users. There are several sentences and responses that you will want to customize for your skill.

    1. Go back to your copy of index.js.

    2. Look for the comment "TODO: The items below this comment need your attention." This is the beginning of the section where you need to customize several text strings for your skill. Rather than document all of them here, we have left comments in index.js to help you understand the purpose of each one.

    3. Continue through index.js until you reach the bottom of the file. This will ensure that you cover each of the values that you need to update.

  4. New language. If you are creating this skill for another language other than English, you will need to make sure Alexa's responses are also in that language.

    • For example, if you are creating your skill in German, every single response that Alexa makes has to be in German. You can't use English responses or your skill will fail certification.

  5. Once you have made the updates listed on this page, you can click "Next" to move on to Publishing and Certification of your skill.