Work around for Alexa Custom Skill Reoccuring response

Question

I am building a custom Alexa skill In which I can ask the name of User and repeat it. (Working fine). Now, the next part is to confirm the name of the user.

Alexa: "Please confirm your name!"<br>
User:"-"

Alexa: "Please confirm your name!"<br>
User: "No"

Alexa: "Please confirm your name!"<br>
**User: "Yes I confirm"**  
End.

Now I am trying to achieve the above behaviour, as Alexa should prompt "Please confirm your name!" on every 10 seconds until the user Responds

"Yes, I confirm".

I have checked the API documentation but not able to find any Intent related to this case.

Please share some info or solution.

shradha shradha · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-22T07:16:00

Repromting every 10 seconds when the user doesn't responds, not sure if we can do.

But we can achieve the Yes/No part. One way of doing this is by using the state. Here in this example, I am using the node-cache module for state management.

Consider the below intent named "ConfirmationQuestionIntent". It sets the state to "confirm-name".

const ConfirmationQuestionIntentHandler = {
  canHandle(handlerInput) {
    return (
      handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.type === "IntentRequest" &&
      handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.intent.name === "ConfirmationQuestionIntent"
    );
  },
  handle(handlerInput) {
    const speechText = "Please confirm your name as 'John'.";
    myCache.set('state','confirm-name');
    return handlerInput.responseBuilder
      .speak(speechText)
      .reprompt(speechText)
      .getResponse();
  }
};

Now, enable/Add two BuiltIn intents, AMAZON.YesIntent and AMAZON.NoIntent. Consider the AMAZON.NoIntent below, In the handler function. it checks if there is any state with the name "confirm-name". If it is present, it responds with "Please confirm your name as 'John'." and if not then responds with the default response.

const NoBuiltInIntent = {
  canHandle(handlerInput) {
    return (
      handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.type === "IntentRequest" &&
      handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.intent.name === "AMAZON.NoIntent"
    );
  },

  handle(handlerInput) {
    const state = myCache.get("state");
    let speechText = "I didn't get this!. Could you please rephrase.";
    if(state === "confirm-name") speechText = "Please confirm your name as 'John'.";
    return handlerInput.responseBuilder
      .speak(speechText)
      .reprompt(speechText)
      .getResponse();
  }
};

Consider the AMAZON.YesIntent below, In the handle function, it checks if there is any state named "confirm-name". If it is, then it responds back with "Thanks for the confirmation" and deletes the state from the cache. If not then it asks the user to rephrase.

const YesBuiltInIntent = {
  canHandle(handlerInput) {
    return (
      handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.type === "IntentRequest" &&
      handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.intent.name === "AMAZON.YesIntent"
    );
  },

  handle(handlerInput) {
    const state = myCache.get("state");
    let speechText = "I didn't get this!. Could you please rephrase.";
    if(state === "confirm-name") speechText = "Thanks for the confirmation.";
    myCache.del('state');
    return handlerInput.responseBuilder
      .speak(speechText)
      .reprompt(speechText)
      .getResponse();
  }
};

So, you can use "State" to identify in which scenario the user is responding to and then provide the right response.

Work around for Alexa Custom Skill Reoccuring response

2 Answers