Work: Voice User Interface Design
Time: October 2017

I became interested in Voice Interation Design since I bought a Amazon Echo dot in October, 2017. Then I went to a local Alexa Workshop to get some fundermental knowledge. It was in the workshop brainstorm, I had the idea to develop a skill for wisdom quotes. I searched quotes APIs on the Internet and found a wikiquotes python package. Based on the package, I developed my first Alexa skill. The skill was written in Python with Flask-ask, Zappa.

Human speeches work with Alexa via a string of different function words. As the below graph shown, the wake word and launch words are assigned by Amazon, developers could set their own skill invocation names, while users could use utterances to interact with Alexa.
When people want to ask Alexa do something, different people have different ways of speaking. Therefore, when design Alexa skill, it is very important to figure out the possible dialogue paths between users and Alexa. The dots that connect dialogues are Intents. For the same intention, different users use different utterances. By giving Alexa a pool of sample utterances, Alexa will be able to recognize users' intents. Here is how I design Wisdom Quotes skill dialogues.
Full script of codes can be found here.