I'd like Alexa to be able to accept a variable-length list of English letters to my custom skill. It will allow users to search based on a string.
There's two steps to this:
- Getting good representation for individual letters that Alexa can understand
- Enumerating sample utterances with variable number of letters
For the first, one way would be to define a custom slot that has as its enumerated values of the English alphabet:
SLOT_LETTER
ay
bee
see
dee
ee
eff
gee
... etc
but that feels hacky. Does Amazon support any way to do this or is there a cleverer way?
I'd really rather not use NATO phonetic ("alpha bravo charlie" for "A-B-C") because it's a terrible user experience and very few people actually know them.
For the second issue (sample utterances), for AMAZON.LITERAL
I want to define something like:
SpellIntent find me things starting with {first second|SLOT_LETTER}
SpellIntent find me things starting with {first second third|SLOT_LETTER}
SpellIntent find me things starting with {first second third fourth|SLOT_LETTER}
But I don't think Amazon will let you define a variable length LITERAL using a custom slot (since they are different "types")?