Understanding Alexa Skills Kit Templates

Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) offers a set of templates for you to start developing skills for Amazon Alexa. However, when you are developing with ASK CLI and you are doing it for the first time, it is hard to understand which template means what kind of skill. This post it to detail it down to each template Alexa offers as of date with what it means for you to be quick with picking one template.

To use the pre-built templates, remember that you need git installed on your machine.

Available Templates can be found here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ask-cli/templates.json

$ ask new --template

1	$ ask new --template

Using this command you can create a new skill project from the built-in “Hello World” sample or from one of the supported open source templates by using the –template option.

--template

1	--template

The above option returns all the templates available and you can use up and down arrows to pick one.

Following are the details of each of the template available.

Quiz Game

This Alexa sample skill is a template for a basic quiz game skill. Provided a list of interesting facts about a topic, Alexa will quiz a user with facts from the list.

You can see an example of this skill in action – just enable the United States Quiz from the Alexa app.

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-quiz-game.git

Fact

This Alexa sample skill is a template for a basic fact skill. Provided a list of interesting facts about a topic, Alexa will select a fact at random and tell it to the user when the skill is invoked.

Some of my fact based skills you can test are Batman Facts, Planet Facts, Indian Cricket Facts.

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-fact.git

Trivia

This Alexa sample skill is a template for a trivia style game with score keeping. Alexa will ask you multiple choice questions and seek your response. Correct and Incorrect answers to questions are recorded.

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-trivia.git

City Guide

This Alexa sample skill is a template for a local recommendations skill. Alexa will use the data that you provide to offer recommendations according to a user’s stated preferences.

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-city-guide.git

Decision Tree

This Alexa sample skill is a template for a basic decision tree skill. Progress through a series of questions to get a career suggestion from Alexa!

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-decision-tree.git

Team Lookup

This Alexa sample skill is a template for a team look up skill. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way you could look up the contact information for people by just asking Alexa? The sample data included with this template lets you search for Alexa Evangelists and Solutions Architects by the city and their first/last names.

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-team-lookup.git

High Low Game

This Alexa sample skill is a template for a basic high-low game skill. Guess a number, and Alexa will tell you whether the number she has in mind is higher or lower.

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-highlowgame.git

Pet Match

This Alexa sample skill is a template for a simple Pet Match skill for humans. When launched, this Alexa Skill will prompt the user for the information it needs to determine a match. Once all of the required information is collected, it will send the data to an external web service which processes the data and returns the match.

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-petmatch.git

Feed

This tutorial will go through all the required steps involved in creating a feed reading skill using a template called ‘Feed Reader’. Ask to play your feed and this skill will do so.

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-feed.git

How To

This Alexa sample skill is a template for a skill using a template called ‘Minecraft Helper’. Ask how to craft an item in the game Minecraft, and this skill will give you instructions.

Tutorial: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-howto.git

Tutorial for building an Alexa Skill with CLI