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Ride B
Developing Alexa Skills with MongoDB & Golang
SANFRANCISCO

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Ken W. Alger
Developer Advocate at MongoDB
SANFRANCISCO

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not a requirement, it is a convenience.
Something to Note

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$200.00 in MongoDB Atlas credits with ALGER200
Something to Note

The Alexa Virtual Assistant
Hardware, Skills, and the Flow of Events

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Amazon Alexa Powered Devices

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Amazon Alexa Powered Devices

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What is an Alexa Skill?

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Alexa, ask Nest to set the thermostat to 75 degrees
Alexa, ask Uber to request a ride
Alexa, ask WebMD for the side effects of Tylenol
Using Alexa Skills

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Alexa performs a speech to text analysis
Alexa recognizes the invocation word
○ Ex: Uber, Nest, WebMD, etc.
Alexa associates the spoken command to an Intent
The Intent information with optional parameters are sent to the API
Alexa in Action

FaaS with AWS Lambda
Functions as a Service with Go on AWS Lambda

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The AWS Lambda SDK for Go

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“Hello World” with AWS Lambda SDK and Go

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AWS Lambda Dashboard

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Cross-Compiling Go Applications for Lambda

MongoDB with AWS Lambda
MongoDB with Go on AWS Lambda

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The MongoDB Go Driver

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Connecting to MongoDB with Go

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Sharing a Connection to MongoDB

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Using an Available MongoDB Connection

The Alexa Developer Portal
Skill Configuration, Testing, and Publishing

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Alexa Developer Dashboard

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Not the same as the Skill name.
Used to initiate Skill on an Alexa powered device.
○ Alexa, ask INVOCATION_NAME…
Should be real words that can be easily pronounced.
Should be unique to prevent Skill overlap.
Alexa Invocation Name

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An Alexa Skill has numerous Intents.
Intents are individual Skill commands or actions.
○ Ex: Get the current temperature.
○ Ex: Get the weekly forecast.
Utterances are phrases to activate an Intent.
The more utterances for an Intent, the less likely to be misunderstood.
Alexa has reserved Intents for specific functionality.
○ Ex: Asking for help using the Skill
Alexa Intents and Sample Utterances

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Sample Utterances for “AboutIntent”

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Sample Utterances with Slot Variables

Requests and Responses
Formatting Data Between Alexa and Lambda

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Alexa Request Payloads

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Lambda to Alexa Response Payloads

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The Unofficial Alexa SDK for Go

Processing Alexa Intents
Responding to Alexa Requests in Go

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“Hello World” with Alexa and Go

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“Hello Human” with Alexa and Go

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Alexa Request Payloads

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Dispatching Alexa Requests

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HelpIntent
StopIntent
CancelIntent
FallbackIntent
Reserved Alexa Intents

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Reserved Alexa Intents

MongoDB in an Alexa Skill
Alexa with MongoDB through Example

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Cooking with MongoDB

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Connecting to MongoDB with Go

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Sharing a Connection to MongoDB

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Dispatching Intents

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The MongoDB Recipe Schema

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The MongoDB Recipe Schema

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Alexa Request Payloads

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The `GetIngredientsForRecipeIntent` Logic

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The `GetIngredientsForRecipeIntent` Response

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The `GetRecipeFromIngredientsIntent` Logic

DEMO
Queue the Demo!

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https://github.com/mongodb-developer/alexa-golang-example
MongoDB Alexa Skill on GitHub

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Including MongoDB is simple with the Go driver.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not a requirement, it is a convenience.
Invocation names should be real words that are pronounceable with most accents.
Sample utterances should exist for all possible requests.
Functions should finish executing quickly.
Summary

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$200.00 in MongoDB Atlas credits with ALGER200
MongoDB Atlas

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Alexa - developer.amazon.com/alexa
Lambda - aws.amazon.com/lambda
MongoDB Go Driver - https://docs.mongodb.com/ecosystem/drivers/go/
Twitter - @kenwalger
Getting Help

THANK YOU