ALX303: Building a Smarter Home with Alexa

CEO Andy Jassy discusses the latest AWS news and announcements.

CTO Werner Vogels discusses the latest AWS news and announcements.

Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton

As we add thousands of skills to Alexa, our developers have uncovered some basic and more complex tips for building better skills. Whether you are new to Alexa skill development or if you have created skills that are live today, this session helps you understand how to create better voice experiences. Last year, Capital One joined Alexa on stage at re:Invent to talk about their experience building an Alexa skill. Hear from them one year later to learn from the challenges that they had to overcome and the results they are seeing from their skill. In this session, you will learn the importance of flexible invocations, better VUI design, how OAuth and account linking can add value to your skill, and about Capital One's experience building an Alexa skill.

The experience in the auto industry is changing. For both the driver and the car manufacturer, a whole new frontier is on the near horizon. What do you do with your time while the car is driving itself? How do I have a consistent experience while driving shared or borrowed cars? How do I stay safer and more aware in the ever increasing complexity of traffic, schedules, calls, messages and tweets? In this session we will discuss how the auto industry is facing new challenges and how the use of Amazon Alexa, IoT, Logistics services and the AWS Cloud is transforming the Mobility experience of the (very near) future.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory designs and creates some of the most advanced space robotics ever imagined. JPL IT is now innovating to help streamline how JPLers will work in the future in order to design, build, operate, and support these spacecraft. They hope to dramatically improve JPLers' workflows and make their work easier for them by enabling simple voice conversations with the room and the equipment across the entire enterprise.

Learn how to develop voice-based serverless back ends for Alexa Voice Service (AVS) and Alexa devices using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), which allows you to add new voice-based interactions to Alexa. We’ll code a new skill, implemented by a serverless backend leveraging AWS services such as Amazon Cognito, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB. Often, your skill needs to authenticate your users and link them back to your backend systems and to persist state between user invocations. User authentication is performed by leveraging OAuth compatible identity systems. Running such a system on your back end requires undifferentiated heavy lifting or boilerplate code. We’ll leverage Login with Amazon as the identity provider instead, allowing you to focus on your application implementation and not on the low-level user management parts. At the end of this session, you’ll be able to develop your own Alexa skills and use Amazon and AWS services to minimize the required backend infrastructure. This session shows you how to deploy your Alexa skill code on a serverless infrastructure, leverage AWS Lambda, use Amazon Cognito and Login with Amazon to authenticate users, and leverage AWS DynamoDB as a fully managed NoSQL data store.

Natural user interfaces, such as those based on speech, enable customers to interact with their home in a more intuitive way. With the VUI (Voice User Interface) smart home, now customers don't need to use their hands or eyes to do things around the home — they only have to ask and it's at their command. This session will address the vision for the VUI smart home and how innovations with Amazon Alexa make it possible.

Ever wonder what it takes to add the power of Alexa to your own products? Are you curious about what Alexa partners have learned on their way to a successful product launch? In this session you will learn about the top tips and tricks on how to go from VUI newbie to an Alexa-enabled product launch. Key concepts around hardware selection, enabling far field voice interaction, building a robust Alexa Voice Service (AVS) client and more will be discussed along with customer and partner examples on how to plan for and avoid common challenges in product design, development and delivery.

Hitting the submit button to publish your skill is similar to sending your child to their first day of school. You want it to be set up for a successful launch day and for many days thereafter. Learn how to set your skill up for success from Andy Huntwork, Alexa Principal Engineer and one of the creators of the popular Alexa skill 'The Magic Door'. You will learn the most common reasons why skills fail and also some of the more unique use cases. The purpose of this session is to help you build better skills by knowing what to look out for and what you can test for before submitting. In this session, you will learn what most developers do wrong, how to successfully test and QA your skill, how to set your skill up for successful certification, and the process of how a skill gets certified.