Alexa

alexa-rails is a ruby gem which is a mountable rails engine that will add abilities to your Ruby on Rails application to handle Amazon alexa requests and responses.

Intallation/Usage

Do the usual by adding the following to your Gemfile:

gem install alexa-rails

Migrations

The gem provides migrations that are needed to use few features of the gem. For example: Saving or reading the user's skill usage count. To generate the migrations, run the following

$ rails generate alexa:migrations
$ rake db:migrate

Configuration

Set alexa skill IDs in environment config (ex: config/environments/development.rb).

  # config/environments/development.rb

  # For request validation
  config.x.alexa.skill_ids = [
    "amzn1.ask.skill.xxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxx"
  ]

  config.x.alexa.default_card_title = [
    "Alexa rails"
  ]

Mount the engine for routes handling in your routes

  # config/routes.rb

  Rails.application.routes.draw do
    ...
    mount Alexa::Engine, at: "/alexa"
  end

Request handling

After the above steps, your application is ready to accept requests from Alexa servers at /alexa/intent_handlers. You will have to provide that in the HTTPS endpoint URL for your skill.

To handle an intent, you will have to create an intent handler class. For example, if your intent is named PlaceOrder, you will have to create the following file under you app/lib/intent_handlers directory.

module Alexa
  module IntentHandlers
    class PlaceOrder < Alexa::IntentHandlers::Base
      def handle
        ...
      end
    end
  end
end

All intent handlers should contain a #handle method that has required logic as to how to handle the intent request. For example, adding session variables, setting response to elicit slots, etc.

Adding session variable:

session.merge!(my_var: value)

Slot elicitations

Depending on your conditions, you can set the reponse to elicit a specific slot and the respecitve views are used.

response.elicit_slot!(:SlotName)

Views

The content for speech and display cards is not set in the intent handler classes. We follow rails convention and expect all response content for intents to be in their respective view files.

Also, the views are context locale dependant.

Given an intent named PlaceOrder, you view files would be

• SSML: views/alexa/en_us/intent_handlers/place_order/speech.ssml.erb
• Card: views/alexa/en_us/intent_handlers/place_order/display.text.erb

In case of slot elicitations, follow a similar convention but make sure you name the ssml and text files with the same name as the slot that is being elicited. For example, in the PlaceOrder intent, the elicatation for Address slot would have the following views

• SSML: views/alexa/en_us/intent_handlers/place_order/elicitations/address.ssml.erb
• Card: views/alexa/en_us/intent_handlers/place_order/elicitations/address.text.erb

SSML

Re-prompts

By default, there is no re-prompt SSML is added to the response. However, re-prompt SSML can be set in the ssml view of the intent response or a slot elicitation view with a content_for :repromt_ssml like this:

What is your address?

<% content_for :repromt_ssml do %>
  Where would you like the pizza to be delivered?
<% end %>

Cards

Type & Title

By default, the card type is set to Simple. To change the card type and title, use the content_for blocks in the text view file for the response as follows:

<% content_for :card_type do %>
  Simple
<% end %>
<% content_for :card_title do %>
  Get your pizza
<% end %>

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'alexa'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install alexa

Contributing

Contribution directions go here.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.