The creator of Flask-Ask will show your group of 3 or more how easy it is to program the Amazon Echo with Python!

You ask 'Alexa' to play songs, get the weather, and report scores. Those 'skills', as they're called, have an open API for building conversational apps. That API is the Alexa Skills Kit, and Flask-Ask is a Python framework that makes working with it easy.

Developing with Flask-Ask is fun. It's a novel experience to write and test conversational code, and it presents well over the web.

Flask-Ask was released in May of 2016. It's been featured on:

• The Amazon Developer Blog
• HackerNews
• ProductHunt
• /r/learnpython

The presentation is structured with a quick talk followed by a live coding session that demos the Amazon Echo in conversation.

To schedule, your group must have 3 or more people. The group can be a start-up, Meetup, Facebook group, or whatever! It doesn't matter how many people attend, but you must have membership of at least 3.

We can work over Google Hangouts, YouTube live stream, etc.

Please contact john@johnwheeler.org to set up a date and time for the remote presentation.

Echo Device Talk and Slides (3 mins) -----------------------------------

Quickly discuss the differences between:

• The Echo
• The Echo Tap
• The Echo Dot

Also discuss the availabilty of the Alexa service.

There are two Alexa related APIs:

• The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)
• The Alexa Voice Service (AVS)

Flask-Ask is for the former. The latter is for IoT device makers.

This part of the talk also discusses Flask-Ask alternatives, the tools needed for development, and deployment options.

Programming Model Talk and Slides (5 mins) -----------------------------------------

Basics concepts of the Alexa Skills Kit are introduced before going into Flask-Ask.

The Alexa Skills Kit is based on its own request/response model built in JSON on top of REST, so it made sense to incorporate mitsuhiko's architectural patterns for Flask like decorator-based routing, context locals, and templates, and adapt them for Flask-Ask.

Here, we'll discuss how it all fits together.

I'll develop a simple memory game that asks you to repeat three numbers backwards while it keeps score. Changes will be tested live on an Echo Tap. Github will have the code and slides afterwards.

Present further resources for learning and take questions.

Thank you for considering this proposal.

John Wheeler

Schedule your demo by sending an e-mail to john@johnwheeler.org