Alexa, Siri, Cortana and Google Now - voice-activated personal assistants are one of the hottest trends in technology these days. They are a great way to convey complex information to your customers in a free-flowing, conversational way. Alexa is a great way to build them - an AWS service for building conversational interfaces for Echo, FireTV and a host of Alexa-aware devices. 

• Alexa and Lex are state-of-the-art, with support for new devices being added all the time
• Powered by a deep learning based engine that parses user voice and resolves the contents of user utterances to API calls and parameter values
• No deep learning or natural language processing expertise is needed to build even complex voice and chat apps
• Provides an intuitive way of specifying the conversational interface
• Automatically and dynamically adjusts conversational responses
• Easy to build, test and publish app

In the sections on Alexa we will cover:

• The big picture - voice and text interfaces and current trends in human-computer interaction
• How Alexa, Lex, Echo and the other bits of the Amazon ecosystem come together
• Interaction models: Utterances, intents, slots, prompts and their resolution into API calls
• Fulfilment models: Using AWS Lambdas to fulfil user intents, and how AWS lambdas provide smooth, no-ops, auto-scaling code endpoints

In the sections on Lex we will cover:

• Interaction models: Utterances, intents, slots, prompts and their resolution into API calls
• Fulfilment models: Using AWS Lambdas to fulfil user intents, and how AWS lambdas provide smooth, no-ops, auto-scaling code endpoints
• Third-party integration: How a chatbot can be added to your Slack workspace