Alexa Skills with Claudia Bot Builder

• By Gojko Adzic
• Nov 22, 2016

Claudia Bot Builder 2.7.1 is now on NPM, introducing support for Amazon Alexa Skills. You can now build Alexa Skills as easily as any other Claudia Bot. Bot Builder will handle the parsing and response packaging for the most common scenarios, and you can use the full Alexa API for more advanced scenarios. To configure your bot with this new interface, use --configure-alexa-skill.

For a nice example, see the Spelling Bee Alexa Skill example project. Watch it in action.

Another important update is the ability to turn off some platforms when deploying. Claudia Bot Builder now supports 9 platforms, so setting up all the endpoints takes a bit of time. If you’re interested in supporting only one or two of them, then you can speed up deployment significantly by using the second optional argument to the botBuilder function, and include a list of platform names into the platforms array key to limit the deployed platform APIs:

const botBuilder = require('claudia-bot-builder');

module.exports = botBuilder(function (message, originalApiRequest) {
  return `I got ${message.text}`;
}, { platforms: ['facebook', 'twilio'] });

The list of platform names can include: facebook, slackSlashCommand, telegram, skype, twilio, kik, groupme, viber, alexa.