Building Alexa skills with Python (by Milton Huang)

Milton Huang will give a tutorial covering how to make an Alexa Skill in Python, using the SDK.

This will start with an overview of how Alexa skills work, then cover the coding process and testing with the Alexa simulator. We will also test on an actual device.

If you want to follow the coding steps, you will need to set up a couple of things ahead of time:

1. you need an Amazon Developer account, which you can set up for free at https://developer.amazon.com/­. You will be asked for your email address, and if you have an Alexa device, you should use the email address associated with that device.

2. you will need an AWS account, as I will create the skill endpoint on AWS Lambda, and show how that is connected to the Alexa service. If you don't have one, you can set up an AWS account at https://aws.amazon.com/­

Be sure you can reach the dashboard for each of these accounts.

If you are really gung-ho and want to download everything ahead of time, you can load the ASK-SDK libraries from PyPI into a `src` folder by using the command `pip install ask-sdk -t src/`