Create Your Own Alexa Skill

3.10 End-to-End Testing

So at this point, I have now compressed or zipped my index.js and my node modules directory, and have uploaded them back to my Lambda Management Console. So that that has the latest and greatest code, that has all the handlers for my intents now. So now I've comeback to Amazon Alexa, into our test interface here. And now I can start to interact with Alexa using our skills. So once again, remember, I can say, ask tuts to get new courses. And we should get this long list of courses like you see right here, and that's good. So you can see the input that's being sent to our function, and then the response or output that we're getting back. So let's say for some reason, I wanted to take a look at one of these, and I wanted to add them to my watch list. But before I did that, I wanted to maybe learn a little bit more about a particular course on here. So let's say I wanted to get the teaser. I could say, ask tuts to get teaser for, something called Learn PHP. That's in the list somewhere, so let's go ahead and take a look. And I see, all right, the teaser for Learn PHP for WordPress is as follows. WordPress makes it easy, and you can see the teaser information that is found coming from the Tuts+ website. So that's pretty cool. So yeah, I think that does sound pretty interesting. Why don't I add that to my watch list for later on? So before I do that, maybe I wanna see, what do I currently have on my watch list? I haven't taken a look at that in a while. So I could, say ask tuts to get watch list. So on here, now I can see that there's currently no courses on my watch list, which is accurate. But now I wanna add something to that list. I wanna add the one that starts with Learn PHP for WordPress. So let's go ahead and say, ask tuts to add Learn PHP to watch list. So sending that across now, I'm gonna say, the course Learn PHP for WordPress by Rachel McCollin has been added to your watch list. Now if everything is working correctly and I do the same thing, and ask tuts to add learn php to watch list, I should get a response back to say that it already exists on my watch list. Which is absolutely true. And there's probably another one on here that I really wanna pay attention to as well. So we're gonna say, ask tuts to add Create a Free Website to watch list. Cuz that sounds like a good one too. So of course, that's by this cool guy named Derek Jensen. So now we have a couple of things on our watch list. But let's go ahead and get that list back, so we can be sure. Ask tuts to get watch list. So now we should be able to see that, right now, here are the things that are on my watch list, Learn PHP for WordPress, as well as Create a Free Website with GitHub Pages. So now, as you can see, we've been able to create a skill using the Alexa SDK and the Alexa Skills Kit, to create this brand new skill. Using the Web interface on the Alexa side, we've been able to go into the Lambda Management Console and create a brand new Lambda function with code that we wrote from scratch, with a little bit of help from our friend, the Alexa SDK. And we've been able to tie these two things together, to create a fairly cool application where we can now interact with Alexa to be able to query some information from Tuts+, to be able to get a list of new courses, kind of look through them a little bit, get additional information, and then add them to a watch list. So now I know which ones I wanna see and maybe which ones I have. And so now you can see the basic flow of how you can create the skill, and then add intent handlers in your Lambda functions.