Voice Assistant Development

Overview Building for Voice Assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri) is different from building web apps. It relies on Voice User Interfaces (VUI).

Architecture 1. Wake Word: "Alexa..." (On-device detection). 2. ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition): Converts audio to text ("Play jazz music"). 3. NLU (Natural Language Understanding): Extracts Intent (PlayMusic) and Entity (Genre: Jazz). 4. Fulfillment: Lambda function executes logic (calls Spotify API). 5. TTS (Text to Speech): "Playing Jazz music."

Skills & Actions

• Alexa Skills Kit (ASK): Amazon's SDK.
• Actions on Google: Google's platform (now converging with Android Intents).

Design Challenges

• No Visuals: You can't show a list of 10 items. You must summarize ("Here are the top 3 results...").
• Discoverability: How does the user know what they can say? (Critical to provide help prompts).
• Ambiguity: "Play the rock" (Dwayne Johnson movie or Rock music?).

Current State LLMs are replacing rigid NLU intents. "Alexa LLM" allows for dynamic, non-scripted conversations, moving away from the rigid command-and-control model.