Dark Sky Alexa Skill

This is a skill built for Amazon's Alexa service that queries the current forecast from the Dark Sky API. It allows you to ask Alexa the following:

Alexa, ask Dark Sky what it's like outside in Brooklyn

Alexa, ask Dark Sky what the weather's like in Chicago right now

Alexa, ask Dark Sky what the conditions are in Los Angeles for the hour

Alexa, ask Dark Sky what the forecast in San Francisco is this week

If you're just getting started developing skills for Alexa, I'd recommend reading Getting Started with the Alexa Skills Kit and Developing an Alexa Skill as a Lambda Function to get familiar with the process.

Testing The Skill Locally

You'll need to register for a developer account with the Dark Sky folks and get an API key. Once you do that, open up .env and add your API key in the first line of that file.

You can use node-lambda to test this skill locally. In the test_events directory are several event files you can use for testing, and they should map pretty well to each Intent. To test an intent, simply copy the contents of one of the json files in that directory and overwrite the contents of event.json. Then run node-lambda run from the command line.

Setting up the Skill

To set up the skill, head on over to Alexa skills kit development console and add a new skill. Fill in the basic skill information however you choose. For Endpoint, you'll need to fill in your Lambda ARN which you'll get in the next step. Next, head on over to Interaction Model. In the Intent Schema field, copy and paste the contents of the interaction_model/intent_schema.json file. Then in the Sample Utterances field, copy and paste the contents of interaction_model/sample_utterances.txt.

Hosting the Skill

The skill is built to be easily hosted on Amazon's AWS Lambda service. Create your Lambda function (using the alexa-skills-kit-color-expert blueprint) and make sure you choose Node.js as the runtime. After you've created your Lambda function, look at the top right of the page to get your Lambda ARN number and put that in the Alexa Skill Information Endpoint field.

To deploy to Lambda, first makes sure you do an npm install at the root of the project. Once all the dependencies are installed, run npm run bundle, which will create a lambda.zip file. You can then upload that zip file to Lambda for use in your function and skill.

You can also use node-lambda to deploy to your Lambda function directly from the command line. Simply add a deploy.env file with your environment configuration (and double check the supplied .env file in this repository) and then run node-lambda deploy. Please visit the node-lambda project page for more information on deploying from the command line.