Alexa is the speech and personal assistant technology behind Amazon Echo. Today you can use Alexa to listen to music, play games, check traffic and weather, control your household devices such as Philips Hue and Belkin WeMo, and lots more. Alexa offers a full-featured set of APIs and SDKs that you can use to teach her new skills and add her into devices and applications of your own.

On Saturday July 9th we bring you the first ever Hackster.io + Amazon Alexa workshop!

Please bring a laptop to follow along.

Robert McCauley, Alexa Developer Evangelist at Amazon, will be teaching Alexa Skill Building 101 starting at 9am. In this talk, intended for software and hardware developers interested in voice control, home automation, and personal assistant technology, we will walk through the development of a new Alexa skill and incorporate it into a consumer-facing device.

The talk will be followed by lunch and an afternoon of hacking. Finish off the day with incredible prizes sponsored by Amazon.

Participants who complete and submit 3 Alexa Skills to Amazon within 30 days will recieve an Amazon Tap worth $130!

Agenda

• 9:00 - 9:30 - Welcome

• 9:30 - 10:15 - Amazon Account Setup

• 10:15 - 10:30 - Break

• 10:30 - 11:45 - Intro to Amazon Alexa/Echo and Walkthrough Writing Your First Skill

• 12:00 - 2:00 - Lunch and Working on Your First Skill

• 2:00 - 3:30 - Walktrough Skill Lesson 2 - Trivia Skill

• 3:30 - 3:45 - Break with Snacks

• 3:45 - 4:45 - Office Hours: Advanced Topics - Persistance, Advanced Grammar, Debugging

• 3:45 - 4:45 - General: Writting Your Second Skill - Open Q&A and Help to finish your 2nd Skill

• 4:45 - 5:00 - Partcipant Demos