Exporting to an Alexa Skill - Amazon Lex V1

If you are using Amazon Lex V2, refer to the Amazon Lex V2 guide instead.

 

If you are using Amazon Lex V1, we recommend upgrading your bots to Amazon Lex V2. We are no longer adding new features to V1 and strongly recommend using V2 for all new bots.

Exporting to an Alexa Skill

You can export your bot schema in a format compatible with an Alexa skill. After you export the bot to a JSON file, you upload it to Alexa using the skill builder.

To export a bot and its schema (interaction model)

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon Lex console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/lex/.

  2. Choose the bot that you want to export.

  3. For Actions, choose Export.

  4. Choose the version of the bot that you want to export. For the format, choose Alexa Skills Kit, then choose Export.

  5. If a download dialog box appears, choose a location to save the file, then choose Save.

The downloaded file is a .zip archive containing one file with the name of the exported bot. It contains the information necessary to import the bot as an Alexa skill.

Note

Amazon Lex and the Alexa Skills Kit differ in the following ways:

  • Session attributes, denoted by square brackets ([]), are not supported by the Alexa Skills Kit. You need to update prompts that use session attributes.

  • Punctuation marks are not supported by the Alexa Skills Kit. You need to update utterances that use punctuation.

To upload the bot to an Alexa Skill

  1. Log in to the developer portal at https://developer.amazon.com/.

  2. On the Alexa Skills page, choose Create Skill.

  3. On the Create a new skill page, enter a skill name and the default language for the skill. Make sure that Custom is selected for the skill model, and then choose Create skill.

  4. Make sure that Start from scratch is selected and the choose Choose.

  5. From the left menu, choose JSON Editor. Drag the JSON file that you exported from Amazon Lex to the JSON editor.

  6. Choose Save Model to save your interaction model.

After uploading the schema into the Alexa skill, make changes necessary for running the skill with Alexa. For more information about creating an Alexa skill, see Use the Skill Builder (Beta) in the Alexa Skills Kit.