Last month, we released the first part of a new advanced training series on using conversational voice design techniques to make your Alexa skills more engaging for your customers. This interactive course is available for free on Codecademy. Today we are excited to launch a new course in the series that shows you how to enhance your Alexa skills using dialog management to create engaging multi-turn conversations with your customers.

Learn How to Build Multi-Turn Conversational Skills

As humans, conversations generally come naturally to us. When engaging in a conversation–however the method–we instinctively go back and forth with questions and answers rapidly. Think about the last time you ordered pizza, reserved a table at a restaurant, or had a friendly conversation with a stranger. In all of these scenarios, you probably had a dynamic, unscripted conversation. When building Alexa skills, this is the kind of voice experience we’re striving for.

Using the dialog management features in the Alexa Skills Kit, you can enable your skill to ask engaging questions to collect a set of necessary slots and deliver a more conversational experience to customers.

In this new Codecademy course, you’ll learn about Alexa’s dialog directives and use them to build single and multi-turn dialog with customers. You will learn how to prompt the customer for input (slot elicitation), confirm input from the customer (slot confirmation), and finally confirm the intent (intent confirmation). You'll also learn the conversational design concepts behind these tools to make flexible and dynamic skills.

Quiz Your Dialog Management Skills

At the end of the course, we provide a few ways to test and practice what you learned. You can take the multiple-choice quiz to test your knowledge. You can also tackle an optional project and a code challenge that puts your new skill-building knowledge to use.

Get Started with Dialog Management

Visit the new Alexa dialog management 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.

Make Money by Creating Engaging Skills Customers Love

When you create delightful skills with compelling content, customers win. You can make money through Alexa skills using in-skill purchasing or Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills. You can also make money for eligible skills that drive some of the highest customer engagement with Alexa Developer Rewards. Learn more about how you can make money with Alexa skills, and download our guide to learn which product best meets your needs.