Aleksa

Aleksa is a small framework for writing Alexa Skills in Kotlin.

Warning

This framework uses an old version of the Alexa SDK - skills built with it won't work with Alexa anymore.

Usage

Maven

<dependency>
    <groupId>de.mkammerer.aleksa</groupId>
    <artifactId>aleksa</artifactId>
    <version>1.2</version>
</dependency>

Gradle

compile group: 'de.mkammerer.aleksa', name: 'aleksa', version: '1.2'

Features

• Embedded Jetty server
• Configurable via code or commandline flags
• Supports hosting multiple skills in one application
• Convenience functions for plaintext responses, SSML, repromts, slots, sessions and more
• Dev mode which simplifies skill testing while development
• TLS
• Metrics

Example

Speechlet implementation:

// Inherit from SpeechletV2Base, it implements SpeechletV2 and implements optional methods with empty bodies
class HelloWorldSpeechlet : SpeechletV2Base() {
    override fun onIntent(requestEnvelope: SpeechletRequestEnvelope<IntentRequest>): SpeechletResponse {
        val intent = requestEnvelope.request.intent

        return when (intent.name) {
        // use the tell function to create a tell response
            "HelloWorldIntent" -> tell("Hello world")
        // The BuiltInIntents object contains the Alexa built-in intents
            BuiltInIntents.CANCEL, BuiltInIntents.STOP -> tell("Good bye")
        // use the ask function to create an ask response
            else -> ask("What do you want to do?")
        }
    }

    override fun onLaunch(requestEnvelope: SpeechletRequestEnvelope<LaunchRequest>): SpeechletResponse {
        return ask("Hello world. What do you want to do?")
    }
}

Application:

// Start with --help to see available commandline options
fun main(args: Array<String>) {
    // Create your speechlet
    val speechlet = HelloWorldSpeechlet()
    // Add the speechlet to Aleksa
    Aleksa.addSpeechlet(path = "/helloworld", applicationId = "[Your skill id]", speechlet = speechlet)
    // Start Aleksa with the commandline parameters of your application
    Aleksa.start(args)
}

Run it with --interface 127.0.0.1 --port 8080 --dev. Now you can test the skill with curl or some other tool at the url http://127.0.0.1:8080/helloworld.

If you don't specify any commandline arguments, it binds to all interfaces on port 8080 and without dev mode. The dev mode disables request signature checking, timestamp checking and application id verification. It also shows some information on / to ease debugging infrastructure problems (reverse proxies, etc.).

If you want metrics (statistics on how often your skills are executed), add --metrics and check the /metrics endpoint.

For more examples see the examples directory.

Commandline parameters

 -d,--dev                          Enable development mode
 -h,--help                         Prints help
 -i,--interface <arg>              Interface to bind to
 -ka,--key-alias <arg>             Key alias. If not set, a key will be
                                   automatically selected
 -kpw,--key-password <arg>         Key password. If not set, the keystore
                                   password will be used
 -ks,--keystore <arg>              Location to the keystore
 -kspw,--keystore-password <arg>   Keystore password
 -m,--metrics                      Enable metrics
 -p,--port <arg>                   Port to bind to

Documentation

• Functions
• Constants

License

LGPLv3

Contributing

See contributing guidelines.

Maintainer

Moritz Kammerer (phXql)