Overview of the Handsfree Messenger Skill

Before we go ahead and design the Handsfree Messenger skill, we will need to understand a few things:

• What is the system's core functionality?
• What are all of its moving parts?
• How do these parts interact?

The Handsfree Messenger skill will work as follows:

1. The user will start the Alexa Skill by saying a start phrase—"Alexa, Start Handsfree Messenger."
2. Alexa will launch the skill.
3. The user will voice the actual message that needs to be sent: "Send message – Get milk!"
4. Now, this is where it gets interesting. When the user voices the actual message in the previous step, a SendMessage intent will be created and the actual message text will be passed as an argument to that intent.

Note

We have already discussed intents in the previous chapter and so we are assuming that the reader is already familiar with intents and their functionality.

5. The intent is processed by the Lambda, where the Lambda extracts the message from the intent and passes it to the Twilio backend...