Amazon Alexa - How to create Generic Slot

Question

How can I create a generic slot for an Alexa skill? So that I can create my own Todo app and it will recognise the free form text.

Answer 1

Have you done any testing with a slot with some common examples in the slot list? I'm asking because I have a small custom slot with 10 choices and am able to recognize a very wide range of content with it (items that aren't in the list).

Answer 2

This article "Why a Custom Slot is the Literal Solution" says

Using custom slot types for grammar as described above typically fulfills this desire and enables you to improve accuracy through NLP training. If you still just want everything, you can create a custom slot called something like “CatchAll” and a corresponding intent and utterance: CatchAllIntent {CatchAll}. If you use the same training data that you would have used for LITERAL, you’ll get the same results. People typically find that adding a little more scenario specific training data improves accuracy.

If you’re still not getting the results, trying setting the CatchAll values to around twenty 2 to 8 word random phrases (from a random word generator – be really random). When the user says something that matches your other utterances, those intents will still be sent. When it doesn’t match any of those, it will fall to the CatchAll slot. If you go this route, you’re going to lose accuracy because you’re not taking full advantage of Alexa’s NLP so you’ll need to test heavily.

And, by the way, the literal slot is back on Jan 2017, it's not recommended though.

Based on developer feedback we will not remove the LITERAL slot type and you can continue to submit skills that include its functionality.

This is the link to LITERAL Slot Type Reference

Answer 3

The Alexa blog announced a List Skill API. As mentioned above, the literal slot type is no longer supported for new skills.

If you create a custom slot with a number of values - depending on your expected response values with a single word or 2+ words - Alexa will catch also spoken words not on the list and pass them to your skill. Transcription of these words is best effort, and probably not perfect. Amazon discontinued the literal slot type because the results of speech-to-text were not good enough.

As you can sign up for a limited beta on the List Skill API, maybe this will solve your issue.

Answer 4

There is now way to get hold of the original "transcript" of the utterance or a portion of it.

There used to be a literal type built in slot, that gave you something, but Amazon stopped supporting it.