Lab: Build an Alexa History Skill

It's time to create your own Alexa Skill! In this lab, you’ll build a fully functional skill for Amazon’s Alexa that provides year-dated facts from AI History (or some other History of your choosing). Through the process, you’ll get to use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) - a current state of the art API for building voice systems.

But before delving into the lab, it's best for you to go over the Alexa Fact Skill tutorial that the Alexa team provides as a template for building Alexa Skills. Do that now, and come back to continue this lab.

Done with the Alexa Fact Skill tutorial?

Great! In this lab, we'll build on top of that template to create a slightly more advanced Alexa Skill -- a History skill that, in addition to giving the user a random history fact, is also able to take a specific date from the user and give a fact from that year.

You are free to choose any category you wish for your facts. For example, you could have a skill that provides historical facts about a sport, or a location, or hobby, but each fact you provide must include a four-digit year.

If you are not sure what category you want to try, don't worry…an example file has been provided with a few historical facts about artificial intelligence to get you started. It can be hard to come up with a robust list of suitable facts - feel free to crowdsource a list of historical facts with your fellow students!

THIS LAB IS NOT SUBMITTED FOR REVIEW.

Visit Knowledge or Study Groups if you would like to discuss the project.