Alexa Skills Kit Responder

We would like to introduce you to a dev tool we've been using internally for many months. This tool has saved us countless hours, and we hope it can save you time as well. Announcing... The Alexa Skills Kit Responder.

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What is the Alexa Skills Kit Responder?

The Alexa Skills Kit Responder (A.S.K. Responder) is a skill that will let you mock skill responses to your Echo.

You can upload any response you'd like, and the A.S.K. Responder will return it to your Echo when invoked.

This tool allows instantaneous adjustments to your mock responses, which gives you the ability to rapidly validate your content without having to write a single line of code.

Why do we want this?

During the course of development we often encountered situations where we wanted to test small adjustments, but it took longer and longer to do so. We had to rebuild/deploy a service, just to navigate through lengthy unskippable verbal prompts to hopefully reach the results we wanted to validate.

That's when we made the decision to write a tool so fundamentally simple and powerful that it would solve all of these problems at once. The A.S.K. Responder can be used for the following:

• Testing verbal delivery
  • Pronunciation (SSML, IPA)
  • Are pauses and breaks the right length?
  • Are the transitions between sentences smooth?
  • Are verbal reprompts correct sounding?
• Validating the visual response in the Alexa app
  • Did line wraps occur in the right place?
  • Is the content acceptable on the Alexa App and the computer?
  • Did the image display properly in the app?
• Audio file integration
  • Does the audio file integrate seemlessly?
• New card formats

This allows you to validate all of that without even needing a back-end skill.

Example:
Yesterday Amazon unveiled a new card format - the Standard Card. This new card allows skills to return an image in their response. However, updating our skills would take substantial time to implement, just to be able to play with this new feature.

This is where the A.S.K. Responder shines. It doesn't matter what card formats Amazon releases. It doesn't matter how many features they unlock. None of that even slows us down. The A.S.K. Responder is so generic that it's powerful enough to handle anything. Quite simply: We don't need code where we're going.

Within seconds of reading Amazon's announcement I was already copy/pasting the new card format into A.S.K. Responder so I could test it. Sure enough, it worked and was displaying "something" different in my Alexa app. The images used in their example aren't real, so I set about experimenting and configuring hosting for some test images. A few minutes later I had successfully configured image hosting to meet their standards, and I was able to instantly validate it.

Without the A.S.K. Responder this process would have been substantially longer and required a lot of work. As of right now I still have not written a single line of code and I've managed to fully explore the new feature. And we want you to have that same power.

How does it work?

1.) Registering your response with the A.S.K. Responder

The A.S.K. Responder exposes a REST interface that allows you to POST mock responses that are associated with your Echo ID. An example registration of a response with the A.S.K. Responder would look like this:

POST URL:    http://responder.derpgroup.com/responder/user/{yourEchoId}/
POST Headers:    Content-Type: application/json
POST Body:

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "response": {
    "outputSpeech": {
      "type": "SSML",
      "id": null,
      "ssml": "<speak>The Echo says this</speak>"
    },
    "card": {
      "type": "Simple",
      "title": "This is the title in the Alexa app",
      "content": "The Alexa app prints this"
    }
  },
  "sessionAttributes": null
}

2.) Playing your mock response
Then all you have to do is ask the Responder skill on your Echo to play your response:

"Alexa, open Responder"     or    "Alexa, ask Responder to play my response"

Your Echo forwards your voice request through the Amazon servers where it reaches the A.S.K. Responder. The Responder then replies with the mock response that you registered. Amazon does whatever Amazon does, and then sends the response back to your Echo. Then your Echo plays the response, and your Alexa app displays the response card.

It's really that simple.

How do I get started?

This skill cannot be published to the Skill Store because then the public would see it, and get confused by it. It is not meant for the public, it is meant as a developer tool. Thus you must configure it locally for your own account.

Go to this link and follow the instructions:
http://derpgroup.com/responder

That link will explain how to set up and configure the skill for local use. It also explains how to upload content, and how to play it back through your Echo.