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You're reading from  Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2018
Reading LevelBeginner
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781788993487
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Sam Williams
Sam Williams
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Sam Williams

Sam Williams qualified with an aerospace engineering master's degree, then became a self-taught software developer while holding down his first job. While traveling, he started to write articles about the tech he was learning about and accrued an audience of readers on Medium and freeCodeCamp.Currently, Sam works as a lead chatbot developer for the SmartAgent team at MissionLabs, building custom systems for large retailers. His role ensures that he is working with the newest chatbot technologies and is constantly pushing their capabilities.
Read more about Sam Williams

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Improving user experience

While our first version of this skill works well, it can be improved in a few key sections.

  • Error-handling
  • Session memory
  • SSML

Error-handling our API calls

When we first set up this function, we didn't include any error-handling for our API calls. There is a chance that something happens with the API or with our call that causes it to fail. This could be a huge list of things such as broken internet connection, incorrect request, unknown location, expired API key, or the API going down.

To deal with this, we need to modify the way that our skill makes that request to the Open Weather Maps API. One of the limitations of using pure async and await is that we can't tell whether the request...

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Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex
Published in: Sep 2018Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781788993487

Author (1)

author image
Sam Williams

Sam Williams qualified with an aerospace engineering master's degree, then became a self-taught software developer while holding down his first job. While traveling, he started to write articles about the tech he was learning about and accrued an audience of readers on Medium and freeCodeCamp.Currently, Sam works as a lead chatbot developer for the SmartAgent team at MissionLabs, building custom systems for large retailers. His role ensures that he is working with the newest chatbot technologies and is constantly pushing their capabilities.
Read more about Sam Williams