0
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Am new to Amazon alexa skill development and able to see alexa-sdk node modules is available for development. But not able to find more detail in documentation. Do i need to proceed the development with alexa-sdk or with out alexa-sdk.? could any one help me here?

1
there is good documentation available on developer.amazon.com to start with alexa-sdk.... depending upon your project requirement you can choose features of alexa-sdk. 99% time you will need them.. but amazon lamda works very easily with your existing webservices or network as well.Amod Gokhale

1 Answers

4
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Strictly speaking you don't NEED to use it, but you absolutely SHOULD use it - especially if you're just starting out.

There's nothing particularly special that's required for alexa skill development. Essentially all you need is to parse a particularly formatted request and send response formatted alexa interpretation. The module itself simply abstracts these concerns away from you so you don't have to worry about parsing the request, routing requests and formatting the response just right. As with libraries and frameworks for web or app development it's simply a way to be more productive by focusing on your unique requirements - that is the business logic that goes into interpreting requests and providing your unique voice output.

If you're going to be staying in the Amazon ecosystem and hosting on Lambda and persisting any data there's also convenience methods for state and session management as well as simplified data access through DynamoDB.

So - again - no you don't NEED to. But unless you want to reinvent the wheel - you absolutely SHOULD. There is plenty of documentation around for it's use - I would start with the readme on the github project: https://github.com/alexa/alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-nodejs