Voice User Interface Projects

Build voice-enabled applications using Dialogflow for Google Home and Alexa Skills Kit for Amazon Echo

Henry Lee

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781788473354
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788470223
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Computer Science

Develop intelligent voice-empowered applications and Chatbots that not only understand voice commands but also respond to it

Key Features

• Target multiple platforms by creating voice interactions for your applications
• Explore real-world examples of how to produce smart and practical virtual assistants
• Build a virtual assistant for cars using Android Auto in Xamarin

Book Description

From touchscreen and mouse-click, we are moving to voice- and conversation-based user interfaces. By adopting Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), you can create a more compelling and engaging experience for your users. Voice User Interface Projects teaches you how to develop voice-enabled applications for desktop, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

This book explains in detail VUI and its importance, basic design principles of VUI, fundamentals of conversation, and the different voice-enabled applications available in the market. You will learn how to build your first voice-enabled application by utilizing DialogFlow and Alexa's natural language processing (NLP) platform. Once you are comfortable with building voice-enabled applications, you will understand how to dynamically process and respond to the questions by using NodeJS server deployed to the cloud. You will then move on to securing NodeJS RESTful API for DialogFlow and Alexa webhooks, creating unit tests and building voice-enabled podcasts for cars. Last but not the least you will discover advanced topics such as handling sessions, creating custom intents, and extending built-in intents in order to build conversational VUIs that will help engage the users.

By the end of the book, you will have grasped a thorough knowledge of how to design and develop interactive VUIs.

What you will learn

• Understand NLP platforms with machine learning
• Exploit best practices and user experiences in creating VUI
• Build voice-enabled chatbots
• Host, secure, and test in a cloud platform
• Create voice-enabled applications for personal digital assistant devices
• Develop a virtual assistant for cars

Who this book is for

Voice User Interface Projects is for you if you are a software engineer who wants to develop voice-enabled applications for your personal digital assistant devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, along with your car's virtual assistant systems. Some experience with JavaScript is required.

Building a Voice-Enabled Podcast for the Car

Every new car coming out today allows you to use your Android phone for navigation, messaging, calls, and playing music by using Android Auto. Although cars have their own dashboard, using Android Auto on your mobile phone has huge advantages:

• It allows addresses saved with Google Maps or Waze to be used without having to re-enter the addresses in the car's navigation system.
• You can use your favorite messaging application, such as WhatsApp.
• You can take advantage of Google Assistant and perform hands-free tasks, such as asking what the outside temperature is.
• You can use your favorite music players, such as Sound Cloud or Spotify.
• You do not have to learn a new car dashboard. For example, whenever I travel and get a new rental car, I plug in my phone and use Android Auto, and I am ready to go in a minute.

In this chapter, you will learn to develop a voice-enabled podcast for an automobile. You will attain important skills, such as setting up an Android Auto project in Xamarin and creating components such as MediaBrowserService, MediaPlayer, and MusicProvider, which are necessary for Android Auto. Then, you will learn to test, debug, and deploy the podcast application on your Android mobile phone to test its media features.

Here are the topics covered in this chapter:

• Learning about Xamarin
• Android Auto project setup in Xamarin
• Android Auto application development using Xamarin
• Building MediaBrowserService, MediaPlayer, and MusicProvider
• Building an Android media player UI
• Debugging and testing an Android mobile application

This chapter and Chapter 10, Hosting and Enhancing the Android Auto Podcast, will work towards creating the following final product for Android Auto, that is, playing your podcast:

Android Auto podcast

Learning about Xamarin

Xamarin is a popular cross-platform mobile development tool for creating an application for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Typically, in order to create an iOS application, you will be using Objective-C in Xcode; to create an Android application, you will need to use Java in Eclipse or Android Studio; and to create a Windows Phone application, you will need to use C# in Visual Studio. As you can imagine, creating an application for all three major mobile platforms requires three different programming languages and their integrated development environments. With Xamarin, you only need to know C# and Visual Studio. Here are the advantages of utilizing Xamarin:

• Use only C# and Visual Studio to write an application for all platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone).
• The code can be shared across all platforms.
• The user interface can be developed once and can be used on all platforms.
• C# is a very powerful object-oriented language with many advanced capabilities, allowing users to quickly create an application.
• There are large numbers of C# developers available, due to the popularity of Microsoft technology.
• The application performs at the native level because compiled code converts to native byte code.
• Xamarin does not hide platform APIs, but rather fully exposes all native platform APIs as is (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone). In fact, the method names and the programming namespaces exactly match those of native platforms.
• There are many available third-party UI components and libraries to help in development.
• It is free.

Setting up the development environment

In this section, you will learn how to set up a development environment for creating an Android Auto in Xamarin. I am using Windows 8.1 as my development operating system, but you can use Mac as well. Here are the steps you can follow:

1. Download Visual Studio Community 2017 (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/). It can be installed on Windows 7 or higher, or macOS.
2. Click on the downloaded installation file.
3. Go to the Mobile & and Gaming section and select Mobile development with .NET.

The following screenshot shows mobile development with .NET:

Mobile development with .NET

4. Click Install.

Creating a new Xamarin project

In this section, you will be creating an Android Auto Xamarin project in Visual Studio:

1. Start Visual Studio 2017.
2. Go to File | New | Project
3. Select Blank App (Android)
4. Name the project MyPodCast and click OK

The following screenshot shows the MyPoadCast Blank App (Android):

MyPodCast Blank App (Android)

5. Once the project is created, you will see Solution Explorer showing the project's structure.

The following screenshot shows the MyPodCast that we created and the project structure in Solution Explorer:

New MyPodCast project

6. Click on Solution 'MyPodCast' (1 project), which is found in Solution Explorer and press CTRL + S to save the project.
7. Right-click on MyPodCast project | Open Folder in File Explorer and Windows File Explorer will open the MyPodCast folder. Here, you will find the files and directories that were created. Take note of this location and the MyPodCast.sln file, which you will need to open in Visual Studio 2017 to start the project.

The following screenshot shows the MyPodCast physical directory:

MyPodCast directory

In the next section, you will be setting up the MyPodCast Xamarin project to work with Android Auto.

Setting up the Xamarin project for Android Auto

Continuing from the previous section, you will be configuring the Xamarin project for Android Auto:

1. Open Visual Studio 2017.
2. Go to the project through File | Open | Project / Solution, go to the MyPodCast directory, and choose the MyPodCast.sln file.
3. Go to Tools | Android | Android SDK Manager.
4. In the Platforms tab, go to Android 5.0 Lollipop and select Android SDK Platform 21.
5. In Tools | Extras | Android Auto API Simulators and Android Auto Desktop Head Unit (DHU) emulator are selected.

6. Click Apply Changes.

The following screenshot shows the Android SDK manager for installing DHU:

Installing DHU

7. Download and unzip (https://bit.ly/2JF8jMq) the file to the MyPodCast\Resources directory. The downloaded file contains all the i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• Packt Upsell
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Building an FAQs Chatbot
• Building a Fortune Cookie Application
• Hosting, Securing, and Testing Fortune Cookie in the Cloud
• Deploying the Fortune Cookie App for Google Home
• Building a Cooking Application Using Alexa
• Using Advanced Alexa Features for the Cooking App
• Migrating the Alexa Cooking Application to Google Home
• Building a Voice-Enabled Podcast for the Car
• Hosting and Enhancing the Android Auto Podcast
• Other Books You May Enjoy