Intent scopes on Alexa skill

Question

I'm implementing an Alexa search skill for a website. My question is that there is some kind of possibilities to give intents some kind of scopes, so built in Intents could be reused?
I mean, for ex. the AMAZON.YestIntent to have different functionalities on different situations.

Answer 1

You can handle this in your intent handler. You can save context information in the session or a database if you are using one. Then in the intent handler, test the session or DB data to determine which response to take.

For example, in the Who's On First? Baseball Skit skill, the dialog between the user and Alexa is about 85 lines long. The user can say "who?" at several different places in the dialog, and Alexa needs to respond differently depending upon which line of the dialog they are at. To handle this, I simply save the line number in the session. Then when an intent is called, the intent handler gets the line number session variable, uses it to select the appropriate response, and increments it and passes it along in the session for the next line.

Answer 2

It really depends on the complexity of your skill, the accepted answer is a perfectly correct implementation for a simple flow and it starts to address keeping state tied to the session.

If your skill is more complex and you're using Node.js, I would suggest using the official SDK which offers this functionality out of the box: https://github.com/alexa/alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-nodejs

The state management allows you to define which intents should be handled in each state and the rest can be passed to a context-specific handler. More information is here: https://github.com/alexa/alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-nodejs#making-skill-state-management-simpler

The state management takes a little getting used to, but once you have used it, you won't go back because of the control it offers you over the experience.