Last month we released the first two videos in the Alexa video series created by developer education company Big Nerd Ranch. You can find parts 1 and 2 on the official YouTube Alexa Developers channel. Today we are excited to reveal the next two videos in the Big Nerd Ranch series on how to develop Alexa skills locally with Node.js.

In part 3 of 6, “Sessions and Voice User Interfaces”, we will learn about user sessions. This feature allows an Alexa skill to break more complicated data requirements into a series of steps spanning multiple requests to the skill service. We’ll also learn about Amazon’s voice user interface requirements. Following these requirements is important for getting a skill certified for public availability in the Alexa app. Lastly, we’ll introduce home cards. Cards are a graphical user interface element that can be sent from a skill to the Alexa app.

In part 4 of 6, “Persistence”, we will discuss how to link an Alexa skill with a database so that it can save an unfinished user interaction for later use in another session. Having the ability to persist data between Alexa sessions opens the door for far more versatile and sophisticated skills. We will see how to use Amazon DynamoDB to easily read and write data from an AWS Lambda function skill. We will use a library called Dynasty to interact with Amazon DynamoDB and handle asynchronous results more easily and elegantly.

Stay tuned for the last two videos from Big Nerd Ranch later this month.

Learn More

Check out these Alexa developer resources:

• Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)
• Big Nerd Ranch blog series
• Introduction to Voice Design – Udemy course
• Alexa Developer Forums
• Knowledge Base
• Alexa Skills Kit Training
• Developer Office Hours