quirkydatascientist1978 / challenges-associated-with-architecting-a-voice-user-interface-vui-

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, Lex, Alexa and Twilio VUI / TUI Application Development

Challenges-Associated-with-Architecting-A-Voice-User-Interface-VUI-

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, Lex, Alexa and Twilio VUI / TUI Application Development

Title: Challenges Associated with Architecting a Voice User Interface (VUI) and Text User Interface (TUI) for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) / Processing (NLP)

Problem. Ambient computing is the future and is already all around us. Simply put ambient computing is the collection of devices we use at home and work. They essentially become extensions of each other and offer us an overall seamless user experience. It’s the combination of hardware, software, user experience and machine/human interaction and of course learning. Prototyping the user experience can be hard – particularly with VUIs. Getting the VUI correct can be challenging for a multitude of reasons. If you get the design wrong – then your user will have a horrible experience and more than likely won’t use your skill again! Learning how to architect this correctly is paramount. Some of the toughest challenges to resolve will be error handling, misspellings, mispronunciations (including accents). This project shall include but not limited to the utilization of out of the box functionality of AWS including Lambda, Lex, Alexa as well as Twilio. AWS functionality will be integrated with Twilio.

Motivation. The purpose of this project was to learn how to build a Voice User Interface (VUI) / Test User Interface (TUI) utilizing AWS Lambda, Lex, Alexa, and Twilio. I have read multiple blogs and watched many YouTube videos about how complex architecting a VUI can be – so I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to see for myself just how complicated it can be to architect a VUI. Additionally, the future systems will include VUI – there is no way around it. Keeping abreast of technological trends is very important especially when the future involves VUI’s. There is a lot of interest in the public and private sectors for incorporating Alexa like functionality into future intelligent systems to solve business problems and make systems overall more user friendly and by default more intuitive. Alexa like skillsets have broad applications in today’s modern world. Learning how to architect, design and program such skillsets are a very valuable skill in today’s world.