How to give input to Amazon Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) mixed string with numbers?

Question

I\'m trying to create a Amazon Alexa Skills Kit to do some kind of automation which would be required to take speech input comprised of strings and numbers (a-test12fi

Answer 1

You didn't indicate how you intended the user to say the value. For example, "a dash test twelve fish" or "a dash t e s t one two f i s h." In any case, the recognition system is designed to recognize words and that data isn't a valid word.

As for solving the problem, you could try creating a spelling solution (the latter input) by creating a custom slot type with all valid character values and sample utterances the support the valid lengths.

You will have some work to reassemble the message, but it shouldn't be too complicated. The likely challenge will still be from the recognizer. While I haven't tested this scenario under Alexa, most I've used do rather poorly with variable length, alpha numeric strings. The sounds are just too similar and there are several values that could easily be mistaken for pauses and background noises. The typical work around is to use a phonetic alphabet.