django-echo

Django library for creating skills for the Amazon Echo (Alexa)

Getting Started

django-echo is mainly composed of three classes:

• echo.skill.EchoSkill: A subclass of Django's generic.View that handles routing intents and dealing with request data.
• echo.request.EchoRequest: A small wrapper around the JSON data in the request from Amazon.
• echo.response.EchoResponse: A subclass of Django's http.HttpResponse that knows how to generate a valid Amazon Echo response.

Creating a Skill

A skill is a class that subclasses EchoSkill that provides intent handlers:

from echo.skill import EchoSkill

class HoroscopeSkill(EchoSkill):
    def get_horoscope(self, request, sign):
        # Ignore the sign because astrology is bunk.
        return self.respond(
            "Today you need to act first and ask questions later!",
            card=None,
            should_end_session=True
        )

On the Amazon side you would setup an intent called GetHoroscope that has a sign slot, and when that intent is called this get_horoscope method will be called with the slot data.

The self.respond is a helper method that essentially just acts as a pass-through to EchoResponse. You can also use SSML directly and EchoResponse will set the response up correctly:

self.respond("<speak>Today you need to ask questions first and act later!</speak>")

Then you just need to wire the skill up to your urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import url

from .views import HoroscopeSkill

urlpatterns = [
    url(
        regex=r'^horoscope/$',
        view=HoroscopeSkill.as_view(),
        name='horoscope_skill'
    )
]

Responding With A Card

EchoSkill provides a helper to create a simple card:

return self.respond(
    "What alexa should say",
    card=self.create_simple_card("The card title", "The card's content")
)

Session Handling

EchoSkill sets self.request to an instance of EchoRequest (it also saves the http request to self.http_request.) EchoRequest provides the session attributes via a session attribute:

sign = self.request.session.get('sign')

request.session.update({
    'has_requested_horoscope': True
})

If you use EchoSkill.respond this session data will be automatically attached to the response, otherwise you'll need to pass it when creating the response:

return EchoResponse("Output text", session=self.request.session)