"Is the mountain out?" Example Alexa Skill

An example Alexa Skill that pulls the latest tweet from a Twitter user and responds with that.

In this case, I used @IsMtRainierOut to tell us if the mountain is out! - If you're not from Seattle and don't know what I mean by Mountain, this is what I'm talking about!:

Mt Rainier in all its glory :)

You can get this Skill here!

Prereqs

You'll need to make a Twitter app so you can use their API. If you don't know how to get the 4 keys needed to interact with the API, I recommend follow my workshop here

You'll also need an Amazon & AWS account since you're creating an Alexa Skill and this uses an AWS Lambda Function (It's the easiest way to make an Alexa skill).

Take a look at the docs for getting an Alexa Skill here.

Take a look at the docs for getting a Lambda function here.

(optional) I used Claudia.js to deploy to the Alexa Skill since it makes it so easy to get going, but you don't have to. Look at the Getting Started page if you'd like to give it a go!

Getting Started

Now that you have your 4 Twitter keys and are able to easily deploy the code, first we need to create a secrets.json file to store those keys that is mentioned in the .gitignore.

Create a secrets.json file in the root directory with the contents:

{
    "twitter": {
        "consumer_key":         "your",
        "consumer_secret":      "keys",
        "access_token":         "go",
        "access_token_secret":  "here",
    }
}