My notes about some sessions of Alexa Live 2019 conference. Full conference info here

  • How to shift from screen-first to voice-first design

    • Principles
      • Be adaptable
        • Use lots of utterances and variations
        • Slots and synonymous
      • Be personal
        • Remember user information
        • Context & Situation
        • Think on retention
      • Be relatable
        • Be concise and straight to the point
        • In-skill purchases
      • Be available
        • Voice is everywhere
        • Take the initiative & lead the conversation
        • Don't try to convert a flow chart experience, categories and so on to a voice-fist experience
    • Design artefacts in a canvas - Storyboard (Adobe XD and Amazon templates)
      • Happy path
      • What happens when an user return to your skill
      • Alexa should remember previous information
      • Living documentation

  • Tailor your Alexa skill responses to deliver truly personal experiences (dev blog post)

    The goal is to hide the technology behind the experience and being natural

    • Personal Experience
      • Answer any question only once
      • Preferences should become defaults
      • Context is kept thought sessions
      • Language should feel natural
      • Users feels their experience is unique
    • How would you create a personal experience in Alexa?
      • Memory
        • Session Attributes
          • Example: Different error messages depending on an error counter
        • Persistent Attributes
        • User information
          • Time Zones & Measurements
          • Customer Profile API
          • Account Linking
      • Variety
        • Randomization
        • Contextualization
        • Language adaptation
        • Localization & I18n
      • Localization

  • How to build your first great Alexa skill

    • Technologies provided by Alexa
      • Speech recognition
      • Machine Learning
      • Natural Language Understanding
      • Text to Speech
    • Understanding the SDK
      • Handlers
    • Turn-by-turn conversation
      • Ask Follow-up questions
      • Auto-delegation
    • Memory
    • Amazon API > Settings API

  • Alexa Skill Developer Tools: Build better skills faster

    • Design
      • Core values
        • Unconstrained user input
        • Sequential presentation
        • Ephemeral data
        • Text input is easy
      • Principles
        • Be adaptable
          • In grammar vs out of grammar
        • Be contextual
          • Be careful with random answers
          • Session attributes
        • Be available
          • Wide top level UI, not nested menus
    • Build
      • SMAPI
      • ASK CLI
      • VS Code integration
      • AWS CodeStar
    • Test
      • Test events for Lambda code using JSON from simulator
      • Beta testing
        • Pulselabs
    • Launch
      • Analytics
        • Interaction Path

  • Best practices for testing your Alexa Skills (dev blog post)

    All code is guilty until proven innocent

    • Automation FTW
    • Types of testing
      • Unit testing
      • E2E
      • Continuous testing & monitoring
      • Usability performance testing

  • How to write great dialogs for Alexa Skills (dev blog post)

    • Situational design
    • Brevity is King
    • Storyboard (Amazon templates for Adobe XD)
      • Start with your happy path
    • Be adaptable
    • Be brief
    • Handle confirmations
      • Implicit vs Explicit
    • Avoid voice menus
    • Error recovery > try to prevent errors in the first place!
    • Contextual errors
    • When to say sorry
    • Voice quality
      • SSML, punctuations & grammar rules
      • Split personality