Alexa built-in intents

Alexa provides a library of built-in intents. These are intents for common actions that you can choose to implement in your custom skill without providing any sample utterances.

For example, the built-in AMAZON.HelpIntent is automatically mapped to common ways of requesting help from a skill. If you choose to use this intent, users can invoke your skill, say something like “help”, and BotTalk will handle this intent approprietly.

Obligatory built-in intents

There are three obligatory built-in intents that every BotTalk scenario should have:

• AMAZON.CancelIntent
• AMAZON.HelpIntent
• AMAZON.StopIntent

The reason for this is simple: no skill will pass Amazon certification process without those intents.

That is why when you create a new scenario in BotTalk (either from scratch or from a template) - BotTalk will always automatically generate those 3 intents and also connect them to the two corresponding steps: Help and Exit:

    - name: Initial step
      actions:
        - sendText: 'Welcome text'
        - getInput:
      next:
        AMAZON.CancelIntent: Exit
        AMAZON.StopIntent: Exit
        AMAZON.HelpIntent: Help

Stadard built-in intents

In addition to the obligatorz built-in intetns, you can use the standard built-in intents provided by Alexa. For example: AMAZON.YesIntent or AMAZON.NoIntent.

To implement a standard built-in intent, include the intent in the Intents section of the BotTalk editor:

---
intents:
  enroll_for_course:
    - 'enroll me for the course {course_name}'
    - 'enrollment for {course_name}'
    - '{course_name} enrollment start'

  AMAZON.YesIntent:
  AMAZON.NoIntent:

Note, that you don’t need to provide any sample utterances for these intents. As opposed to the custom intent enroll_for_course. Just the name of the intent followed by the colon will suffice.

You can now use the built-in intents in the Scenario section of BotTalk:

- name: Begin Enrollment Question
  actions:
    - sendText: 'Hey, do you want to begin the enrollment process?'
    - getInput:
  next:
    AMAZON.YesIntent: Enroll Step One
    AMAZON.NoIntent: Exit

Here is the list of the Alexa standard built-in intents supported by BotTalk:

You can learn more about the standard built-in intents in the official Amazon Documentation page.