Wrapping Up

There are few things more rewarding than publishing software into production. An application will only be able to fulfill its purpose once it is in front of a wider audience. In this chapter, that’s what we’ve done for the Alexa skill we have created.

We started by fleshing out some of the missing details of the skill manifest, using the ASK CLI’s ask smapi submit-skill-validation command to help find missing or incorrect manifest entries. Then we submitted the skill for certification so that Amazon can verify that our skill meets certain guidelines and expectations. After fixing any certification concerns, we published the skill. Then we saw how to explore the metrics that are automatically collected for our skill to learn how it’s being used and plan for follow-up releases.

Now that our skill has been published, it would seem that we’re at the end of our journey. But before we close the book (literally) on developing Alexa skills, there’s one more thing you will want to learn. In the next and final chapter, we’re going to look at a relatively new technique available to Alexa skill developers that mixes a bit of artificial intelligence with dialogs to create even more natural conversations between Alexa and a user.