Jovo, the open source framework for voice app development of Alexa Skills and Google Actions, releases version 1.0. Read below to learn more about the changes, and see our migration guide here.
About 6 months ago, at voicecamp demo day, we open sourced a very initial release of the Jovo Framework. It was simple, but it did its job, and it has since become the most powerful open source framework for cross-platform voice app development.
We’re extremely proud of our community of talented voice developers and designers, who are building great things on top of the framework. Top apps like Panda Rescue, finalists in the Alexa Kids Skill Challenge, are #builtwithjovo. We believe in the power of this community and launched Jovo Studios earlier this year.
And today we’re launching Jovo Framework v1.0, with some of the most requested features from our members:
- Jovo Model: Create and maintain a consolidated language model that can be pushed to both platforms
- Jovo CLI: Programmatically update your voice apps, e.g. your Alexa Skill with our ASK CLI integration
- Jovo Webhook: An even faster way to prototype and debug locally
- Jovo Templates: More ways to get started with the Jovo Framework
Read more below, or watch this simple step-by-step guide here:
The Jovo Language Model
While Jovo already saved developers a lot of time by being able to build most of the logic of their apps for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant in only one code base, there was still some manual work to do to keep both their Apps for Alexa and Google Assistant updated: The language models.
With the new Jovo Language Model, you only have to maintain a local JSON file:
You can then use the new Jovo CLI to convert this into platform specific language models for Alexa and Dialogflow.
Learn more about the Jovo Language Model here.
The Jovo CLI
The new Jovo CLI comes with new features that let you create, build, and deploy voice apps faster.
For example, this is the typical workflow for an Alexa Skill project:
Learn more about the Jovo CLI here.
The Jovo Webhook
In our tutorials, we usually recommended to use a local webhook with a tool like ngrok for faster local debugging without having to upload every change to AWS Lambda all the time.
It was still a tedious process to install an external tool which served as a tunnel to your local development server. With the new update, we automatically generate a unique webhook link for you to use as an endpoint for even faster development.
New Templates
As the Jovo Framework gets more powerful, it can get quite overwhelming where to get started. Our goal for the next months is to provide you with more and more examples how to use Jovo to build great voice apps.
We’re starting with 3 templates:
- Hello World: This is the default template used with the jovo new command
- Alexa Audioplayer: Build Alexa Skills that use the Audioplayer Directives
- Trivia: Build a simple trivia game
We’re looking forward to hearing what you build with the Framework. Please join our Slack community if you have any questions!
