Build Talking Apps for Alexa

Returning APL-A Responses

Up until this point, anytime we want Alexa to speak anything to the user in response to a request, we have used the speak() function on the response builder, like this:

return handlerInput.responseBuilder
    .speak("Hello world!")
    .getResponse();

But now we’re going to ask Alexa to send back audio rendered from an APL-A template, so we’ll need to do something a little different. Instead of calling speak(), we’ll return a directive that tells Alexa to send audio from a given template. The code to build your response builder will change to look something like this:

return handlerInput.responseBuilder
    .addDirective({
        "type": "Alexa.Presentation.APLA.RenderDocument",
        "document": {
          // APL-A document ...