This talk provides an overview of the history of design in technology, highlighting what we have learned over the years in developing for a screen. Designing for the ear is different from developing for the screen though. This talk establishes best practices for voice-first design contrasting them with GUI design principles. You will learn of the similarities and differences when developing for voice, compared to screen-oriented mediums. Learn how to create engaging experiences where customers can speak in their own words, receive individualised responses, and easily find what they need via voice.

This hands-on workshop will take you through the skill-building process starting with an introduction to Amazon Alexa and the Alexa Skills Kit while illustrating why Voice is the next major disruption in computing.

Build your first skill and then move onto learning voice design and how it differs from designing for the web or mobile. The workshop will also cover advanced topics like storing data in session attributes and building multimodal skills.

The workshop will be hands-on and everyone will have built few skills by the end of the day. There will also be a mini Open Hack and demo time to showcase what you have built.

Amazon Alexa, the cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, provides access to thousands of skills that enable customers to voice control their world - whether it’s listening to music, controlling smart home devices, listening to the news or even ordering a pizza. Alexa developers use advanced natural language understanding that to use capabilities like built-in slot & intent training, entity resolution, and dialog management. This natural language understanding is powered by advanced machine learning algorithms that will be the focus of this talk.

This session will tell you about the rise of voice user interfaces and will give an in-depth look into how Alexa works. The talk will delve into the natural language understanding and how utterance data is processed by our systems, and what a developer can do to improve accuracy of their skill. Also, the talk will discuss how Alexa hears and understands you and how error handling works.

Amazon Alexa, the cloud based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, provides access to thousands of skills that enable customers to voice control their world, whether it’s listening to music, controlling their smart home devices, listening to the news, or even ordering a pizza. This talk will provide an Introduction to the Alexa Skills Kit - how it works and a deep dive of the tech behind it. The talk will also cover basic concepts like intents, utterances, and slots while touching upon the principles of designing for voice interfaces.