Let’s say we want to create a Codecademy skill that will do just one thing — respond with a “Hello, Codecademy” message.

Intents

Before we get into designing the frontend and the backend, it’s a good practice to think of the features or behaviors your skill will have. We call these behaviors intents.

Our Codecademy skill is pretty basic. It will have only one intent — a “HelloIntent” that responds with a greeting. As we will see in later exercises, a typical skill will have multiple intents. Each intent defines a specific behavior, like buttons on a web page. An intent takes user input and executes some code based on it.

Sample Utterances

Speaking of user input, let’s now think through some phrases our users might say which our skill should be able to respond to with a greeting. For example, our skill should give a response to the following greetings —

hello

how are you

howdy

what’s up

These are what we call sample utterances. They help Alexa connect the intents to phrases spoken by the user. In this case, these sample utterances will help Alexa map the spoken user input to our “HelloIntent”.