What are Intents and Slots in Alexa Skill Building?

Intents and slots are central to the Alexa skill building process, but what are they exactly?

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬

Intents consist of names and a list of “utterances”. The latter are the various ways in which a user might ask Alexa a question.
For example,
Name: “RestaurantIntent” Utterances: “Where can I find a good restaurant” or “What’s a good place to eat”.
Machine learning processes will cater for many more ways in which customers might ask this based on the utterances you add.
Each intent is “handled” at the backend, using AWS lambda for instance, and provides appropriate responses for each intent.

𝐒𝐥𝐨𝐭𝐬

Words that express variable information such as names and locations can be allocated as slots.
Such words can be highlighted in the original utterance using curly braces {}
You can then create a new slot name such as StreetName
You then assign your slot name to a slot type such as dates or place names.
These types can be built-in or custom made.

Hope these snippets are helpful 🙂