Amazon has rolled out the ability for developers to migrate their chatbots based on the Lex framework into a skill for Alexa.
Jeff Bezos' company is a story of successes. Amazon’s line of smart speakers, Echo, are by far the most popular on the market and can join the company’s long list of achievements.
The AI powering these speakers, Alexa, may be lackluster in some areas, but its capabilities are going from strength-to-strength due to a dedicated community of developers.
Back in November last year, the Lex framework was launched by Amazon to simplify the development of speech and text bots. The framework also provides automatic speech recognition and understanding of natural speech.
“This will allow you to build all kinds of conversational applications,” said Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, during a keynote in Las Vegas. “You’ll submit either a piece of text or a piece of audio. You’ll specify a response, and then it’ll return that response.”
Amazon is extending the reach of Lex-based chatbots
With today’s migration abilities launch, Amazon is extending the reach of Lex-based chatbots. All developers need to do is log in to the Lex console and export their bot as a JSON file. Anyone familiar with Alexa Skills will know this can be used to create a skill using the ‘Skill Builder’ in the Alexa development portal.
“The JSON configuration file contains the structure of your Amazon Lex chatbot, including the intent schema with utterances, slots, prompts and slot-types. The export functionality simplifies the process of creating an Alexa skill from an Amazon Lex chatbot,” wrote Victoria Kouyoumjian, Senior Product Marketing Manager for AI Services at AWS, in a blog post.
Once migrated, Lex bots can respond to speech on Alexa-supporting devices as you’d expect with any other skill. This development follows the release of a public beta of the Skills Management API and the Alexa Skills Command-Line Protocol last Tuesday.
Are you glad to see the ability to migrate Lex chatbots to Alexa? Let us know in the comments.
