Alexa Skill Integration Testing using Postman

Question

I am in the process of writing a Voice app for Google Home (using DialogFlow) and Amazon Alexa (AWS).

Both voice apps back onto a custom .net WebAPI that serves the answers.

We have written a series of integration tests that test both the Natural Language Processing (Deriving the Intent) and also the backend service. DialogFlow provide API access to their NLP making these integration tests pretty easy to set up.

I am in the process of porting the app to Alexa via AWS and want to perform the same set of integration tests against the AWS NLP but cannot see if this is possible. Most of the testing for Alexa seems to be centered around testing Lambda functions (which we are not using). Does anybody know if it is possible to interact directly with an Alexa skill restfully?

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible, but a little cumbersome.

Alexa Skill Management API (SMAPI) provides RESTful HTTP interfaces for programmatically performing Alexa skill management tasks, such as creating a new skill or updating an interaction model.

You'll need to create a Amazon app to use it and send requests adding Authorization header with all requests.

Docs for implementing this can be found here