Interaction Model

Intents

If you entered from the left menu, you'll see a list of all of our intents. An intent is how Alexa handles the request that the use makes to Alexa.

So far, we have 5 built in intents. AMAZON.StopIntent, AMAZON.HelpIntent, and AMAZON.CancelIntent are required and fairly self explanatory. AMAZON.FallbackIntent is used for when Alexa doesn't know how to respond, so she'll respond according to how you define this intent. There's also AMAZON.NavigateHomeIntent, but we don't need to worry about this one for now.

Click Add Intent to create the custom intent.

Creating an Intent

We'll create a custom intent called GetPokemonIntent. Click Create Custom Intent.

Now we can customize the intent's utterances and slots. Utterances are how the user would speak to Alexa, and slots are the variables that you'd want your user to fill in when making an utterance.

Intent Slots

At the bottom half of the window, we'll add some custom slots first. We'll add one called PokedexNumber, which we're going to use to ask Alexa for a specific Pokemon. Click the + button, and it'll allow us to choose a slot type of AMAZON.NUMBER, which is one of the prebuilt types.

This also automatically adds your slot underneath your custom intent in the left menu. You should see PokedexNumber appear there now.

Adding Some Utterances

Now, we'll define some sample utterances. The utterance is what we're going to ask Alexa to invoke the GetPokemonIntent, and we'll be using the slot that we just defined. For example:

What is the name of pokemon {PokedexNumber}

You can go ahead and add as many of these as you want. Let's make a simpler one.

Who is {PokedexNumber}

Generally a production skill will have over 100 of these to cover all the phrasings that a user might use. The more you add, the better it is for your customers to use it.

Hit Save Model at the top, then click Build Model. This may take a few seconds, but they will notify you when it's finished.

Now we'll configure our skill.

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