Tag Archives: alexa

5 Cool Chatbots: Feb 2017 Edition

ChristopherBot (Facebook)

Never forget your homework again

I have to include this bot first; it’s received a lot of press over the past few weeks, and rightly so. A great little concept from a 14 year old schoolboy who was forever forgetting about his homework. He created a Facebook messenger chatbot in Ruby and hosted on Heroku to help him (and you!) keep track of work that’s pending.

ChristopherBot

Read more about ChristopherBot on the BBC and try it out over at christopherbot.co. You can view the code (mainly Ruby) over on GitHub – annoyingly good code from someone so young! He puts me to shame..

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Connecting Alexa to a Botframework Chatbot

In the previous article we dissected an Alexa Skill down to the JSON request and Response, and pointed it to an HTTPS endpoint (your laptop) to get a basic end to end Skill working.

In this article I’ll show you how to link that skill into your botframework chatbot.

Creating a botframework reply

Let’s dip back into BotFramework in order to create something that can respond to the incoming request.

Calculating a Chinese Zodiac animal based on the year is really simple; just get the remainder from dividing by 12 and apply a switch:

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Introduction to Alexa Skills: From Zero to Echo

The rise of the conversational interface shows no signs of slowing down; chatbots are the new apps, Siri is getting old already, and although it’s still awkward to say “Ok Google” at your watch or “hey cortana” to your phone, somehow we’re happy to ask “Alexa” for the news, weather, or to play something by Bruno Mars.

The Amazon Echo looks like the first generation of a socially acceptable, almost natural, voice controlled conversational interface.

It’s that first step towards the Star Trek computer; you can’t quite say “Alexa, locate Commander Data” (although you can ask her to beam you up, and for earl grey tea, hot) but you can get a decent answer to “Alexa, where is my phone?” (assuming you’ve installed the relevant app).

All of the tutorials out there for developing your own Alexa Skill require a lot of digging around on Amazon Web Services, learning some nodejs*, and getting knee deep in lambdas (Amazon’s Functions as a Service/Server less architecture solution).

In this article I’ll show you how to easily understand how to develop your own Alexa Skill with just your laptop and a json file

* Actually, AWS Lambdas now support C# too…

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LDNBotFramework Meetup #2 Retrospective: From Zero to Echo via BotFramework

I had an awesome time presenting my session at the second LDNBotframework meetup!

This time I ordered the correct amount of pizza, and let people loose on it at the right time; so no fridge full of pizza for breakfast the next day!

From Zero to Echo via BotFramework

LDNBotFramework #2 - From Zero to Echo via BotFramework

Tight deadline

Having scheduled this session weeks ago, unfortunately my preferred presenters were not able to make it; as such I had just over a week to decide what to do about the already scheduled meetup: should I cancel it and lose momentum, or should I do a session myself?

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