Tag: Voice Design

Categories
App Development Artificial Intelligence Speech Assistants

Local Debugging of Alexa Skills with Visual Studio Code

Screenshot of a breakpoint in an Alexa Skill where the backend is running locally.

Creating an Alexa-hosted skill is a fantastic way to start developing for voice assistants. However, you will eventually face issues that you need to debug in code. Alexa offers local skill debugging through Visual Studio Code but setting it up is a bit tricky. This guide will take you through the necessary steps.

Skill Environment

This guide focuses on a Python-based skill and uses Windows as a local dev environment. Most also applies to other environments.

I’ll start with a blank skill. First, create the skill in the Alexa Developer Console. The skill name I’m using in this example is “local debugging test”. The “type of experience” is “Other”, with a “Custom” model, as I’d like to start with a minimal blank skill. In the “Hosting services” category, choose the “Alexa-hosted (Python)” category. In the last step about templates, stick with “Start from Scratch”, which will give you a minimal Hello World-type voice interaction. The following screenshot summarizes the settings:

Review of the settings for the new Alexa skill that we will configure for local debugging through Visual Studio.
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Categories
Digital Healthcare Speech Assistants

Top New Alexa Skills by Students

Alexa Student Skills Icons
Alexa Student Skills Icons

In the “rapid prototyping” lecture of the degree program Digital Healthcare at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, students faced a unique task: after just a brief introduction to voice design and speech assistants, their assignment was to create and publish an Alexa skill or Google Assistant Action.

The topic was free to choose and up to the creativity of the students. Their creation had to pass the manual skill certification process performed by Amazon. This means that they didn’t have to just develop the skill, but also provide all required metadata like description and icons.

As a development tool for prototyping, we decided to use Voiceflow. It proved to be easy to use and extremely quick to achieve results already in our Alexa for Wellbeing Online Challenge.

Top Alexa Skills by the Students

In total, 14 skills have been developed and published by 14 students. Here, I’d like to highlight a few of the skills that I found especially interesting. Most of these are available in German only.

Cat Quiz

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