Title

Time

Level

Description

ALX 201: How Capital One Built a Voice Experience for Banking

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Introductory

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 will help 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.

ALX 202: How Amazon is Enabling the Future of Automotive

Thursday, December 1, 2016

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Introductory

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.

ALX 301: Alexa in the Enterprise: How JPL Leverages Alexa to Further Space Exploration with Internet of Things

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Advanced

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.

What could this look like? Imagine just talking with the conference room to configure it. What if you could kick off advanced queries across AWS services and kick off AWS Kinesis tasks by simply speaking the commands? What if the laboratory could speak to you and warn you about anomalies or notify you of trends across your AWS infrastructure? What if you could control rovers by having a conversation with them and ask them questions? In this session, JPL will demonstrate how they leveraged AWS Lambda, DynamoDB and CloudWatch in their prototypes of these use cases and more.  They will also discuss some of the technical challenges they are overcoming, including how to deploy and manage consumer devices such as the Amazon Echo across the enterprise, and give lessons learned.  Join them as they use Alexa to query JPL databases, control conference room equipment and lights, and even drive a rover on stage, all with nothing but the power of voice!

ALX 302: Build a Serverless Back End for Your Alexa-Based Voice Interactions

Thursday, December 1, 2016

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Advanced

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.

ALX 303: Building a Smarter Home with Alexa

Thursday, December 1, 2016

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Advanced

This session introduces the beta process, the Smart Home Skill API, and how to quickly and easily set up a smart home so you can begin using Alexa to control lighting, blinds, and small appliances. We begin by going over what devices you can buy and share and some common best practices when enabling these devices in your home or office. We also demonstrate how to enable these devices and connect them with Alexa. We show you how to create groups and manage your home with your voice, as well as some tips and tricks for managing your home when you are away. This session explains how to use the Smart Home Skill API to create a custom skill to manage your smart home devices as well as lessons learned from dozens of customers and partners. Alexa smart home partner Ecobee joins us to talk about their experience in the Smart Home Skill API beta program.

ALX 304: Tips and Tricks on Bringing Alexa to Your Products

Advanced

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. 

ALX 305: From VUI to QA: Building a Voice-Based Adventure Game for Alexa

Friday, December 2, 2016

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Advanced

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.  

MAC 202: Deep Learning in Alexa

Introductory

Neural networks have a long and rich history in automatic speech recognition. In this talk, we present a brief primer on the origin of deep learning in spoken language, and then explore today’s world of Alexa. Alexa is the AWS service that understands spoken language and powers Amazon Echo. Alexa relies heavily on machine learning and deep neural networks for speech recognition, text-to-speech, language understanding, and more. We also discuss the Alexa Skills Kit, which lets any developer teach Alexa new skills.