Voxa Documentation!

Summary

Voxa is an Alexa skill framework that provides a way to organize a skill into a state machine. Even the most complex voice user interface (VUI) can be represented through the state machine and it provides the flexibility needed to both be rigid when needed in specific states and flexible to jump around when allowing that also makes sense.

Why Voxa vs other frameworks

Voxa provides a more robust framework for building Alexa skills. It provides a design pattern that wasn’t found in other frameworks. Critical to Voxa was providing a pluggable interface and supporting all of the latest ASK features.

Features

  • MVC Pattern
  • State or Intent handling (State Machine)
  • Easy integration with several Analytics providers
  • Easy to modify response file (the view)
  • Compatibility with all SSML features
  • Compatible with Audio directives
  • Works with companion app cards
  • Supports i18n in the responses
  • Clean code structure with a unit testing framework
  • Easy error handling
  • Account linking support
  • Persistent session support using DynamoDB
  • Several Plugins

Installation

Voxa is distributed via npm

$ npm install voxa --save

Initial Configuration

Instantiating a StateMachineSkill requires a configuration specifying your Views and Variables.

'use strict';
const Voxa = require('voxa');
const views = require('./views'):
const variables = require('./variables');

const skill = new Voxa({ variables, views });

Responding to alexa events

Once you have your skill configured responding to events is as simple as calling the skill.lambda method

const skill = require('./MainStateMachine');

exports.handler = skill.lambda();

Using the development server

The framework provides a simple builtin server that’s configured to serve all POST requests to your skill, this works great when developing, specially when paired with ngrok

// this will start an http server listening on port 3000
skill.startServer(3000);

Responding to an intent event

skill.onIntent('HelpIntent', (alexaEvent) => {
  return { reply: 'HelpIntent.HelpAboutSkill' };
});

skill.onIntent('ExitIntent', (alexaEvent) => {
  return { reply: 'ExitIntent.Farewell' };
});