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My group and I are first-year computer science students and have been working on a project for school the last two months or so. We want to create a faculty directory for our university using the Amazon Echo. We already have an API (http://moonlight.cs.sonoma.edu/api/v1/directory/person/). What we want to do is have the user ask Alexa what is a faculty member's phone number, email, building name, and office, and she will return with the answer from this API.

We do not know how to do this, unfortunately. How do we write a code that reads from this API and how do we implement it? Since our skill is written in Javascript, I think we would prefer to stick with that. We are completely stuck, however. I apologize if this is a vague.

Cheers!

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You would need to split your solution up into a few different things... you'll need to configure an "Intent Schema" on the Amazon Developer Platform -- this defines the functions that your skill can perform.

For each intent you will then need some sample utterances, which will tell Alexa what sort of phrases to listen for. You may also need some Custom Slot Type definitions depending on what you are doing... for example if you want to have Alexa answer questions such as "Alexa ask what time is the next train from "... would be a Custom Slot with values containing all the station names that your API can get times for.

You can implement your Skill using JavaScript with AWS Lambda, or provide your own backend (e.g. Node JS running on AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Heroku or anywhere you want to put it). I have a blog post that will walk you through the process -- this uses Python as a demonstration but the majority of the setup and configuration will be exactly the same if implementing in JavaScipt.

If implementing in JavaScript, I recommend looking at the Alexa Skills Kit for Node which is provided by Amazon.

Simon Prickett
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