July 2019
Intermediate to advanced
264 pages
7h 33m
English
Overview
Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant is your guide to designing, building, and implementing voice-based applications for Alexa and Google Assistant. Inside, you'll learn how to build your own "skills"—the voice app term for actions the device can perform—from scratch.
About the Technology
In 2018, an estimated 100 million voice-controlled devices were installed in homes worldwide, and the apps that control them, like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, are getting more powerful, with new skills being added every day. Great voice apps improve how users interact with the web, whether they’re checking the weather, asking for sports scores, or playing a game.
About the Book
Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant is your guide to designing, building, and implementing voice-based applications for Alexa and Google Assistant. You’ll learn to build applications that listen to users, store information, and rely on user context, as you create a voice-powered sleep tracker from scratch. With the basics mastered, you’ll dig deeper into multiuse conversational flow and other more-advanced concepts. Smaller projects along the way reinforce your new techniques and best practices.
What's Inside
- Building a call-and-response skill
- Designing a voice user interface
- Using conversational context
- Going multimodal
- Tips and best practices
About the Reader
Perfect for developers with intermediate JavaScript skills and basic Node.js skills. No previous experience with voice-first platforms is required.
About the Author
Dustin A. Coates is a developer who focuses on voice and conversational applications. He’s currently the voice search lead at Algolia and is also a Google Developers Expert for Assistant as well as cohost of the VUX World podcast.
We interviewed Dustin as a part of our Six Questions series. Check it out here.
Quotes
Embrace the voice revolution, and start building delightful Alexa skills using this book.
- From the foreword by Max Amordeluso, EU Lead Evangelist Alexa
An indispensable reference for voice practitioners, whether you’re new to the field or a grizzled veteran.
- John Kelvie, Bespoken
Dustin weaves together high-level concepts with super-pragmatic, in-the-trenches explanations.
- John Gillilan, bondad.fm
What separates Dustin’s approach from others is the conceptual sensitivity he brings to the hardest problems in multimodal interface and voice-activated AI.
- Lin Nie, Dataminr
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