Alexa Conversations when you have a couple goals in your skill

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Maksym Hryhoriev asked · Jul 28, 2020 at 04:41 PM

Alexa Conversations when you have a couple goals in your skill

It's clear how to use a new Alexa Conversation when your skill just makes a pizza order. But is it possible to use it when you have a couple of flows like order the pizza and get the history of your orders ? As I understand it you should create many dialogs for your goal and if you have a couple of goals then it's not possible to mark that parts of these dialogs belong to order the pizza and other ones for get the history of your orders.

alexa skills kit alexa-conversations

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Answer 1 · 2020-07-28T23:23:18Z

KirkC@Amazon answered · Jul 28, 2020 at 11:23 PM

Hi Maksym. Similar to how you can have multiple "intents" in a traditional custom skill, representing different tasks to be performed by the skill's back-end, in an Alexa Conversations you can define multiple "APIs".

Getting my order history and ordering a new pizza seem like distinct separate tasks so you might make both an "orderPizza" and a "getOrderHistory" API.

You would create separate "Dialogs" for each representing "happy paths" of how a user might interact with Alexa to perform these actions. You'd then "annotate" those dialogs specifying which APIs to invoke, which "responses" to use and identify what slots would be required from the user.

If you haven't done so already, I'd highly recommend walking through our Alexa Conversations based "Pet Match" tutorial skill. By the end of "module 4" you'll have a functioning Alexa Conversations based skill:

https://alexa.design/ac-tutorial

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matthewp · Jul 28, 2020 at 11:47 PM

@KirkC what's unclear is how to use the result of an API to have different responses depending on what is returned. Ex. If someone asks for their pizza order history and they have none, to then ask them if they want to order a pizza. I think conditions is how to do this but there are no docs explaining how or examples.

This is a common need, results of APIs can influence the direction of a conversation.

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KirkC@Amazon ♦♦ matthewp · Jul 29, 2020 at 10:41 PM

Hi matthewp. Great followup. It is possible to change which response your skill uses depending upon the results returned by your API. To do this you would need to manually edit the APLA response template:

Click "Alexa Conversations"
Click "Responses"
Click "Edit" next to the response in question
Under "Audio Response (required)" click "Edit Audio Response"
This will open up a new tab where you can edit the JSON of the APLA document.

In our documentation, we have an example of adding a "where" key to an APLA document item to conditionally choose a response based upon the API's returned values:

https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/alexa-presentation-language/apla-conditional-component-inflation.html

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Alexa Conversations when you have a couple goals in your skill

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