Edible Bites: Building a Skill for Amazon Alexa Takes Some Serious Skills

Working at USC Annenberg Media has given me many opportunities to explore different kinds of new and cool ways to tell a story. We are catching up with the ever-evolving journalism industry. We are experimenting with Instagram Stories, Snapchat, Facebook Live, 360 videos, even Facebook 360-live videos. We have platforms for all these emerging technologies to tell a story, but Annenberg Media hasn’t invested in developing a platform for using Alexa. This is a very new experience for me.

After putting all the audio pieces together, we have to actually develop the skill for Alexa. The process is very new and complicated to me. We needed to go back and forth between our Amazon Developer account to create an Alexa skill and building a Lambda function. Despite available templates online and guidelines, the processes were still a little confusing. We had difficulties in testing our skill set as we could not get the Lambda response.

So far the hardest part is figuring out the technical part of developing the app and publishing it. I have difficulties in understanding and am trying to play with the codes that go into the app development. So we got stuck a little bit at the very end of our project, but are moving forward.