Tag: Speech

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App Development Artificial Intelligence Speech Assistants

Local Debugging of Alexa Skills with Visual Studio Code

Screenshot of a breakpoint in an Alexa Skill where the backend is running locally.

Creating an Alexa-hosted skill is a fantastic way to start developing for voice assistants. However, you will eventually face issues that you need to debug in code. Alexa offers local skill debugging through Visual Studio Code but setting it up is a bit tricky. This guide will take you through the necessary steps.

Skill Environment

This guide focuses on a Python-based skill and uses Windows as a local dev environment. Most also applies to other environments.

I’ll start with a blank skill. First, create the skill in the Alexa Developer Console. The skill name I’m using in this example is “local debugging test”. The “type of experience” is “Other”, with a “Custom” model, as I’d like to start with a minimal blank skill. In the “Hosting services” category, choose the “Alexa-hosted (Python)” category. In the last step about templates, stick with “Start from Scratch”, which will give you a minimal Hello World-type voice interaction. The following screenshot summarizes the settings:

Review of the settings for the new Alexa skill that we will configure for local debugging through Visual Studio.
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Categories
App Development AR / VR Cloud Speech Assistants

How-To: Convert Neural Voice Audio from Amazon Polly (mp3) to Spark AR (m4a)

Finished Spark AR project playing a sound file upon its start. The artificial speech was generated using the Amazon Polly text-to-speech neural voice engine.
Finished Spark AR project playing a sound file upon its start. The artificial speech was generated using the Amazon Polly text-to-speech neural voice engine.

Currently, Facebook’s Spark AR Studio is restrictive with supported audio formats. Unfortunately, only M4A with specific settings is allowed. This short tutorial is a guidance on how to convert artificially generated neural voices (in this case coming from an mp3 file as produced by Amazon Polly) to the m4a format accepted by Spark AR. I’m using the free Audiacity tool, which integrates the open-source FFmpeg plug-in.

Spark AR has the following requirements on audio files:

  • M4A format
  • Mono
  • 44.1 kHz sample rate
  • 16-bit depth

Generating Audio using Text-to-Speech (mp3 / PCM)

Neither Amazon Polly nor the Microsoft Azure Text-to-Speech cognitive service can directly produce an m4a audio file. In its additional settings, Polly offers MP3, OGG, PCM and Speech Marks. MP3 goes up to a sample rate of 24000 Hz, PCM is limited to 16000 Hz.

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Categories
Digital Healthcare Speech Assistants

Top New Alexa Skills by Students

Alexa Student Skills Icons
Alexa Student Skills Icons

In the “rapid prototyping” lecture of the degree program Digital Healthcare at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, students faced a unique task: after just a brief introduction to voice design and speech assistants, their assignment was to create and publish an Alexa skill or Google Assistant Action.

The topic was free to choose and up to the creativity of the students. Their creation had to pass the manual skill certification process performed by Amazon. This means that they didn’t have to just develop the skill, but also provide all required metadata like description and icons.

As a development tool for prototyping, we decided to use Voiceflow. It proved to be easy to use and extremely quick to achieve results already in our Alexa for Wellbeing Online Challenge.

Top Alexa Skills by the Students

In total, 14 skills have been developed and published by 14 students. Here, I’d like to highlight a few of the skills that I found especially interesting. Most of these are available in German only.

Cat Quiz

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Categories
Speech Assistants

Quick Hack: Random Dialog Paths in Voiceflow

Testing the random number selection in the Alexa Developer Console.

In dialog trees for voice assistants, you often need to introduce some randomness. If the smart speaker doesn’t always repeat the same phrases, the dialog sounds more natural. Many other use cases exist as well, e.g., you might want to ask the user a random question in a quiz.

Random Block in Voiceflow

To enable this functionality, Voiceflow includes a “Random” block. This enables choosing a different path each time. The “no duplicates” option ensures that it’s not going the same path twice.

However, while this works fine in the Voiceflow testing environment, it currently has issues when using the skill live on Amazon Alexa. Additionally, you might sometimes want to have more control over the process – e.g., pre-set the random choices, store them in a database for advanced logging or tease the next item when the skill ends.

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Categories
Cloud Events Speech Assistants

AWS IMAGINE: Accelerating Transformation in Education

AWS IMAGINE Accelerating transformation in education

As an unexpected catalyst, the COVID-19 pandemic drove rapid change in global education, including improved accessibility for some, affordability, and curricula aligned with job skills needed for the modern world.

Of course, cloud technologies play a fundamental role in the new world of teaching. In the global panel session by AWS, I’ll share insights about:

  • How remote students can solve a real-life wellbeing problem with a working prototype in just 10 days.
  • How learning and retention can be improved through the open-source Voice Learning Alexa skill.
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Categories
Speech Assistants

Alexa Development with Voiceflow for Newcomers

Speech Assistants & Smart Speakers Overview

Speech assistants are one of the most important ways to access services in the future. They are usable without further instructions even by children and elderly. And they’re hands-free. These advantages are reflected in their growing adoption: according to voicebot.ai, already one third of American households have a smart speaker .

Amazon’s Alexa is leading the market, followed by Google Assistant. Also, Baidu, Alibaba, Xiaomi and Apple Siri are important players. Strategy Analysis runs regular reports on market share data . Obviously, usage is quite different by market. For example, Baidu, Alibaba and Xiaomi are stronger in Asian markets. But overall, Amazon Alexa together with its Echo smart speaker ecosystem is the perfect place to start if you want to reach as many people as possible, globally.

Developing for Amazon Alexa

When you decide to create a “Skill” for Amazon Alexa, you have two basic options:

  • Alexa Skills Kit: Use Amazon’s developer tools directly. This gives you all features but is also the most complex to start. You need to write at least a bit of JavaScript (through Node.js) or Python code. The Alexa-hosted option is easy to set up. You can edit the code right from the browser. No need to provision any other services anymore.
  • 3rd Party Tools: for example, Voiceflow or the Microsoft Bot Framework. While you still need to create the Alexa skill in Amazon’s frontend (so that it is also discoverable by Alexa-powered devices), the skill design & development then mostly happens in these tools. Often, their editors are easier to use and/or even offer cross-platform support.

Especially for people with little experience in JavaScript development or if your skill is simple, 3rd party tools are often the better choice. If you want deep integration into the platform, use the latest features (like Alexa Conversations or the Motion Sensor APIs), go with the Alexa Skills Kit.

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Categories
Digital Healthcare Events Speech Assistants

Alexa for Wellbeing Online Challenge

Image copyright: Jakob Doppler / Build.well.being 2020 / envato elements

In the near future, we will primarily interact with technology through voice. Especially for older generations and kids, voice has the lowest entry barrier – compared to the complexity of computers or even smartphones. Simply start talking to speech assistants like Amazon Alexa, and they will help immediately.

To make most use of it, I’ve co-organized the “Alexa for Wellbeing Online Challenge” during the last few weeks. Together with AWS Educate and Hilfswerk Lower Austria, we’ll host a 10-day online hackathon, open to everyone.

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