Peter Rukavina's Podcast

I had my first Alexa Skill certified today, one I built over the past couple of weeks for City Cinema here in Charlottetown. “Alexa Skills” are custom apps built for Amazon’s voice-controlled Echo line of products; think of them as a very early prototype of the computer on Star Trek, but lacking most of the artificial intelligence. While Echo devices aren’t yet available for sale in Canada, they work in Canada, at least mostly, and it’s clear they’ll be here eventually. So it’s a good time to build up some “voice app” muscle memory, and City Cinema was a good, simple, practical use case. Simple and practical because there’s really only one thing people want to know about City Cinema: what’s playing. Tonight. On Friday. Next Thursday. So here’s a high-level overview of what it took to make an Alexa Skill. First, I needed to select an Invocation Name. This is the “trigger word” or the “app name” that Alexa will glue to my skill. I selected the obvious: City Cinema. Next, I created an Intent Schema, a JSON