Tag: JavaScript

Categories
Speech Assistants

Quick Hack: Random Dialog Paths in Voiceflow

Testing the random number selection in the Alexa Developer Console.

In dialog trees for voice assistants, you often need to introduce some randomness. If the smart speaker doesn’t always repeat the same phrases, the dialog sounds more natural. Many other use cases exist as well, e.g., you might want to ask the user a random question in a quiz.

Random Block in Voiceflow

To enable this functionality, Voiceflow includes a “Random” block. This enables choosing a different path each time. The “no duplicates” option ensures that it’s not going the same path twice.

However, while this works fine in the Voiceflow testing environment, it currently has issues when using the skill live on Amazon Alexa. Additionally, you might sometimes want to have more control over the process – e.g., pre-set the random choices, store them in a database for advanced logging or tease the next item when the skill ends.

Continue reading “Quick Hack: Random Dialog Paths in Voiceflow”
Categories
App Development Artificial Intelligence Cloud

Computer Vision & Photo Description: Really Simple HTML / JavaScript Example

Example overview: specify an image URL and your API key, get a complete image description from an Artificial Intelligence service.

Image classification & content description is incredibly powerful. Cloud-based computer vision services instantly return a JSON-based description of what they see in photos.

However, most examples are quite complex. As a beginning developer with your main knowledge in HTML + JavaScript, the following code is for you. You don’t need to worry about Node.js or native apps. The code runs directly in your browser from your computer.

Continue reading “Computer Vision & Photo Description: Really Simple HTML / JavaScript Example”
Categories
App Development Cloud

Node.js and Cloud NoSQL Databases: Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB Quickstart

Learn how to access a cloud-based NoSQL database from Node.js. The Azure Cosmos DB stores documents (e.g., JSON) and allows scaling for improved performance plus geo-redundancy with one click. The access interface also allows well-known SQL queries.

This guide uses the latest Azure Cosmos DB JavaScript module (released as final version just 17 days ago). Additionally, this article is based on the ES 2017 standard. The async / await syntax makes the code short and readable. In contrast to many other tutorials, this article focuses on the minimum code required to understand the concepts.

The complete source code of this article is available on GitHub.

Continue reading “Node.js and Cloud NoSQL Databases: Azure Cosmos DB”
Categories
App Development

Asynchronous JavaScript with Promises & Async/Await in JavaScript

From the perspective of a C# developer, the introduction of Async and Await into the latest JavaScript version (ECMAScript 2017+) is a welcome addition. It makes asynchronous code a lot cleaner and more readable.

However, a lot of legacy libraries and code snippets are out there. It’s usually difficult to go all-in with async/await. This article is a short intro to error handling and the evolution of asynchronous development in JavaScript.

Error Handling in JavaScript

Most asynchronous operations like web requests can cause an error. Thus, let’s spend a minute reviewing the basics of the code flow.

Continue reading “Asynchronous JavaScript with Promises & Async/Await in JavaScript”