BotTalk New Release - Code Name Apollo 11

by Andrey Esaulov

Today BotTalk launched a new release - codenamed Apollo 11 - the best release we have ever shipped. We're very excited to tell you all about it.

Amazon In-Skill Purchasing

Starting today, every user of the BotTalk Community Edition can sell digital products, using Amazon In-Skill Purchasing (ISP).

To make selling in-skill products from the BotTalk scenarios easier, we created an ISP Plugin, which is enabled for all the users automatically.

This plugin adds five new actions:

BotTalk users can learn all about those new actions in the Alexa In-Skill Purchasing Tutorial we've created.

API Calls

BotTalk extended the support of making API Calls from the Alexa Skills and Actions on Google.

With the new HTTP Plugin, the developers can now make the whole range of REST requests using these actions:

To illustrate how powerful this plugin is, the team has created a tutorial that teaches how to write a voice-driven task manager using BotTalk and Trello API.

Better Voice User Experience

With every release we try to introduce features in BotTalk, that would boost the User Experience of the voice applications created on the platform.

We want BotTalk scenarios to follow voice best practices by design.

In this release, we introduce a new action - sendRandomText - that brings variety into the dialogues - thus making the Alexa Skills and Google Actions sound even more natural:

- name: Initial Step
  actions:
    - sendRandomText:
      - "Hey, what a wonderful day for JobBuddy!"
      - >
         Welcome to our job consulting skill! 
         Just say Alexa, ask JobBuddy
         {{ random(["How do I become a programmer?", "How much money doctors make?", "What should I study to become Elton John"]) }}
      - >
         Welcome to JobBuddy. 
         To continue with the search, 
         just say Alexa, ask JobBuddy {{ random(["to continue search", "carry on with search", "continue where I left off"]) }}

Your Feedback

This release would not be possible without the insightful and detailed feedback from our users.

Do you want to request a feature or leave your feedback?

Join our Private Facebook Group

Thanks

The biggest thanks go to the team of our programmers who made it happen! You guys rock!

We 💛 you all =)

Your Support

BotTalk Community Edition is an effort to make the voice development available for everyone. If you want to support the future releases - feel free to donate to our Community Development Fund.