Amazon has rolled out the ability for developers to
migrate their chatbots based on the Lex framework into a skill for Alexa.
Jeff Bezo’s company is a story of successes. Echo, which
is Amazon’s range of smart speakers, are by far the most popular on the market
and can join the company’s long list of achievements.
The AI powering these speakers, Alexa, may be lackluster
in some areas, but its capabilities are going from strength-to-strength due to
a dedicated community of developers.
Looking back last year in November, the Lex framework was
launched by Amazon to simplify the development of speech and text bots. The
framework also provides automatic speech recognition and understanding of natural
speech.
Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, said
during a keynote in Las Vegas “This will allow you to build all kinds of
conversational applications, You’ll submit either a piece of text or a piece of
audio. You’ll specify a response, and then it’ll return that response.”
Amazon is extending the
reach of Lex-based chatbots
With today’s migration abilities launch, Amazon is
extending the reach of Lex-based chatbots. All developers need to do is log in
to the Lex console and export their bot as a JSON file. Anyone familiar with
Alexa Skills will know this can be used to create a skill using the ‘Skill
Builder’ in the Alexa development portal.
“The JSON configuration file contains the structure of
your Amazon Lex chatbot, including the intent schema with utterances, slots,
prompts and slot-types. The process is simplified by the export functionality
of creating an Alexa skill from an Amazon Lex chatbot,” wrote Victoria
Kouyoumjian, Senior Product Marketing Manager for AI Services at AWS, in a blog
post.
Once migrated, Lex bots can respond to speech on Alexa-supporting devices as you’d expect with any other skill. This development follows the release of a public beta of the Skills Management API and the Alexa Skills Command-Line Protocol soon.
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