Build a Working Smart Home Skill in 15 Minutes

Overview

If you would like to learn everything about building Smart Home skills for Alexa, please review our documentation on developer.amazon.com. You can also jump straight into the API reference, and come back to this GitHub repo for Tools and Resources.

However, if you follow the next few steps, you can get a working Smart Home skill built in about 15 minutes. This skill will introduce you to the basics of Smart Home skills, and give you the foundations upon which you can build support for the rest of our Smart Home APIs, and integrate with your user accounts and actual devices.

Prerequisites

• An Amazon developer account, created one here if needed
  • This is required for building and managing skills
  • This is also required if you plan to use Login with Amazon (LWA) as your OAuth provider. OAuth integration is required for Smart Home skills
  • This is an Amazon account, so it can also be used as an Alexa user for testing
• An Alexa-enabled device associated with the above account
  • This can be an Amazon device with Alexa, or an Alexa Voice Service (AVS) enabled device
  • This can also be a virtual device like echosim.io or reverb.ai
• An AWS account -- create one here if needed
  • This is required for building and hosting Lambda functions, which are required for Smart Home skills

Five Easy Steps

Please refer to our official documentation for detailed steps to creating a skill. However, it boils down to the following five easy steps:

1. Setup LWA
2. Create the skill
3. Create the Lambda function
4. Configure the skill
5. Test

Setup LWA

We have a good blog post that describes the process of setting up LWA for the purposes of building this test skill. You can either use your own OAuth provider or use LWA if you don't have one. LWA can also be used for your production skill if you'd like.

If you decide to use LWA, follow the instructions in the blog post under "Step 1". Please ignore the rest of the post as it is out of date. When done, note the following:

• Client ID:
• Client Secret:

Create the skill

This is super easy! The steps here will provide you with the bare minimum required for a working Smart Home skill.

1. Go to https://developer.amazon.com/login.html and sign in
2. Go to Alexa > Alexa Skills Kit (Get Started) > Add a New Skill
3. In the Skill Information tab:
   • Skill Type = Smart Home Skill API
   • Name = Test Smart Home Skill (or whatever you want)
   • Payload Version = v3
   • Click Save

This creates the skill. Note the skill ID near the top, underneath your skill name.

• Skill ID:

Create the Lambda function

This can't be easier! We've provided you with a sample Lambda function that you can just plug and play. To get the sample:

1. Clone this repo (https://github.com/alexa/alexa-smarthome)
2. Navigate to /sample_lambda/python
3. Zip all contents of that directory to python.zip

Now let's setup the Lambda function:

1. Go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/console/home and sign in
2. Go to Services > Compute > Lambda
3. Click on Create Function
4. Step 1: Click on Author from scratch
5. Step 2: Click on the box on the left of "Lambda" and select Alexa Smart Home
   • Application Id = skill ID of your test skill that you noted above
   • Enable trigger = checked
6. Step 3: Configure your Lambda function
   • Name* = SampleLambdaFunction (or whatever you want)
   • Runtime* = Python 3.6
   • Code entry type = Upload a .ZIP file
   • Click on Upload and find the python.zip you created earlier
   • Handler* = lambda.lambda_handler
   • Role* = Choose an existing role
   • Existing role* = lambda_basic_execution
   • Click Next
   • Click Create function
   • On the top left corner, note the Lambda ARN

• Lambda ARN:

Configure skill

Now that you have all the components, let's put everything together. These steps assume you're using LWA for account linking:

1. Go back to https://developer.amazon.com/ and sign in as needed
2. Go to Alexa > Alexa Skills Kit > the test skill you created earlier
3. In the Configuration tab:
   • Lambda ARN default = enter your Lambda ARN noted from the previous step
   • Authorization URL = https://www.amazon.com/ap/oa
   • Client ID = your client ID from LWA noted in a previous step
   • Scope: profile (click Add Scope first to add)
   • Access Token URI: https://api.amazon.com/auth/o2/token
   • Client Secret: your client secret from LWA noted in a previous step
   • Client Authentication Scheme: HTTP Basic (Recommended)
   • Click Save or Next

That's it!

Test!

Now comes the fun part:

1. Go to https://alexa.amazon.com in your browser
2. Login with same Amazon developer account
3. Make sure you have an Alexa device associated with the account. If not, open a new tab and load one of the virtual ones mentioned above
4. Go to Skills > Your Skills (on the top right corner) and search for your test skill, it should be there with a "devUS" tag
5. Click on the skill and then click Enable
6. Log in with the same Amazon credentials when presented with a LWA login page
7. Allow LWA access, and you should see a message that says your skill has been enabled successfully, close this window to discovery devices. Close that window and you should be presented with a popup asking to discovery devices. Discovery devices
8. Go to Smart Home > Devices and you should see several virtual devices
9. Now with your Alexa device, try "Alexa, turn on switch". In CloudWatch, you should see a PowerController.TurnOn directive come to your Lambda, and see that a PowerController response was sent back to Alexa. That allowed you to hear Alexa respond with "OK".

And there you have it, a fully working Smart Home skill. Perhaps it look a little longer than 15 mins, but hopefully it was pretty straightforward. Now that you have a working skill, head on over to our more comprehensive documentation to learn more about other concepts such as the various capability interfaces and how to send events to Alexa.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask in our forums or post in Issues here. Good luck!