Last year, we released a free Alexa skill-building course series in collaboration with Codecademy. Today, we’re excited to announce a new advanced training series on using conversational voice design techniques to make your skills more engaging. In the first course available today, you’ll learn how to use entity resolution to create synonyms for your slots, creating a more conversational voice experience for your Alexa skills. Stay tuned for additional courses in the series to learn more about dialog management and advanced voice design principles.
When engaging in a natural conversation with another person, we often use different words and phrases to describe something. For example, while asking for the weather, we may use synonyms like “downpour,” “shower,” “storm,” and “rainstorm” to refer to the “rain.” When designing your Alexa skill, it’s a good voice design practice to mimic this behavior. By designing skills for natural conversation, you can create magical voice experiences that drive higher customer engagement.
Using synonyms is a great way to make Alexa understand a diverse set of verbal inputs, allowing users to have conversations in the way that comes natural to them. With this course, you’ll learn how to add entity resolution to enable Alexa to understand complex responses, add synonyms to your slot values, and let customers respond to Alexa in a variety of ways.
Visit the new Alexa course on Codecademy to level up your skills today. If you’re just getting started, check out our beginner course series. We can’t wait to see what you build.
Every month, developers can earn money for eligible skills that drive some of the highest customer engagement. Developers can increase their level of skill engagement and potentially earn more by improving their skill, building more skills, and making their skills available in the US, UK, and Germany. Learn more about our rewards program and start building today.