Amazon Alexa Integration With Salesforce
Amazon Echo
Amazon Echo is a voice command device with functions like question answering, playing music and controlling smart devices. Echo connects to Alexa which is a cloud-based voice service, to provide information, answer questions, read the news, and check the weather, etc. – instantly. You just need to ask. Echo starts working as soon as it detects the wake word.
Through Alexa, we can perform many tasks in by doing Salesforce Integration without the need to access the org on the computer. Just say the magic words and Alexa will do it for you! This video shows how we can perform actions on Leads records in Salesforce.
- Get the List of Leads:
You can get all the leads along with their status. Here in this video, you can see Alexa searches for Lead records and brings them to you. - Create New Lead:
You can create a new Lead record in Salesforce. Tell Alexa the first name, last name, and company name and the Lead record will be created. - Modify Lead Record:
You can also modify the Lead record as shown in this video. You need to tell Alexa first name, last name, and new status of Lead. Alexa will take care of the rest.
Development
Prerequisites: Knowledge of Node.js, and Heroku; the Amazon Echo App (iOS, Android & web); GitHub (for storing and retrieving code).
Procedure: If you are familiar with Node.js, development is straight forward after you understand invocations and intents. There are generally two main ways users begin interacting with a custom skill:
- Invoking the skill and making a specific request at the same time (“intent”).
- Invoking the skill with no specific request (“no intent”).
Skills: The simplest way to describe a skill is ‘an app for Alexa’.
Invocations: An invocation is the word or phrase used to trigger your skill.
A user invokes intents with their voice and invocations are the name that identifies the capability the user wants. Utterances, a text file, provide the mappings between the intents and the typical utterances that invoke those intents in a list of sample utterances. Heroku sends information to AWS and performs all the functionalities.
