Gain insights into developing voice apps with Alexa Skills Kit. Delve into real projects, learn fundamentals, and discover how to launch apps on the Alexa skill store.

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Voice is the next big revolution in tech. As conversational AI finds new and interesting use cases, it's time for developers to make use of the new opportunities to re-use their existing skills to build the next generation of apps powered by voice. 

This course will help you learn how to start developing apps for Alexa using the Alexa Skills Kit. You will be building real and interesting projects that will help you understand the fundamentals. Along the way, you will learn all the skills you need to launch your own apps on the Alexa skill store and reach millions of customers around the world. "Hey Alexa, shall we begin?"

Alexa Skills 101: Building voice apps for Alexa

Often, the goal of an Alexa Skill is to be as conversational as possible. We may want our Skill to involve back-and-forth conversations between Alexa and the user rather than have Alexa say something and stop. Along the way, we may want to collect information from users which will further guide the conversation between Alexa and the user.

This is where the concept of a session and session attributes comes in.


# Session

A Skill session refers to all the user interactions that take place from when a user invokes our Skill to when the user exits the Skill.

# Lifecycle of a session
Let’s take a look at the lifecycle of a session to make this definition a little easier to understand.


* A Skill session begins when a user invokes our Skill. As you may recall, there are a series of steps that happen between a user invoking a Skill and the Skill returning the response.
* The Skill back-end receives a request payload which contains various attributes such as the intent type. The same payload also contains a boolean attribute called `new`, which indicates that this is a new session.
* Our Skill back-end now responds back with another response payload. This payload will contain an attribute called `shouldEndSession` (set by you) which indicates whether the session should remain open or be closed.
Depending upon this value, the session either remains open or is closed.
* `shouldEndSession` can be set to one of these three values:
  1. **`false`/`null`**: This indicates that the Skill session should be closed. Our Skill will exit after the response is given back to the user.
  2. **`true`**: This indicates that the Skill session should remain open. Our Skill will be responsible for any utterance the user gives.
  3. **`undefined`**: This is a slightly more complicated case. The Skill behavior is dependent upon what kind of device the user has. If the device has a screen and the Skill response includes screen content, the session stays open for up to 30 more seconds without opening the microphone to prompt the user for input. If the user speaks and precedes their request with the wake word, Alexa sends the request to the Skill. Otherwise, Alexa ignores the user’s speech.


This lesson will explain what a user session is and how to collect data during a user session.

Hello Alexa: An Introduction to the World of Voice

Setting You Up For Success

Your First Skill

Advanced Concepts

Building a Game: Voice Clues

Voice Clues: Coding with ASK CLI

Next Steps

Session and Session Attributes

Session