Extreme Alexa Skills Development: Mastering the Dialog

In this installment of the Extreme Alexa Skills Development series you tackle the Alexa Skill Dialog Management. Throughout the course you will work on a single use case: ordering a burger. You start with the most basic dialog management scenario where you automatically delegate the entire dialog to Alexa. You accomplish this by building out a declarative dialog model from scratch (completely in code). Note you will not use the developer console in this course, except to quickly test the interaction model.

As the course progresses, you move into the next dialog management technique of manually delegating the dialog to Alexa. Using this technique enables you to write code to suggest a saved burger to a user. This adds a layer of personalization and sophistication to your skill.

You don't stop at manually delegating the dialog to Alexa. Next, you go more advanced by giving the skill user the option to select a vegetarian or beef burger. You write code to dynamically change the remaining dialog based on the user's response. This section is all about implementing a hybrid dialog management model where you take control of certain parts of the dialog, and delegate other parts to Alexa.

Finally, you really get your hands dirty by giving up the comforts of the declarative dialog model. You roll up your sleeves and write code to completely handle the dialog. In this scenario, you do not delegate any part of the dialog to Alexa, you control it completely.

This is a hands-on course with a lot of code, and zero manual console configuration. You will only use the Alexa Developer Console to quickly test your interaction model changes.