This week I continued the voice design development of my project using Amazon Alexa Developer Console. I have completed the other half of the Alexa tutorial provided by Amazon titled Build an Engaging Alexa Skill. I was not able to publish the tutorial skill because I kept receiving the following error in the image below. When publishing a new skill for Alexa, you must complete a full description of your skills use and background. This includes providing an example of how to invoke the skill. When I ran to certify that the skill was ready to publish, I was returned an error that tied to the sample phrase that I had.
I moved on from publishing the skill provided by the tutorial and began the implementation of my own Alexa skill for my project. This skill is called Voice Measure, which retrieves the number of cups and substance that the user would like to measure. In my last blog post I mentioned slots; To reiterate slots are dependent on the user’s request and customized information. In this skill, there are two slots: the number of cups and substance. The number of cups is the requested number of cups that the user asks for. The substance is what the user will be measuring, so they could ask to measure rice. I was able to maneuver through the tutorial and modify it to my desired skill. However, I did have difficulty with testing my skill locally as I wrote my code. I am unsure why I am unable to test it locally or even publish the skill. I keep receiving the same error as I was at the end of the tutorial. I will be looking into this error at the beginning of next week. I have found some videos on youtube where people program their Alexa skills live. It must be a small bug that is causing this problem. Next week I also will begin and establish a first draft for my physical dispenser.
