AlexaIntentGenerator

Inside Amazon's Alexa developer console, you set up new "intents" so that when a user speaks, your skill code can perform an action. A frequent problem I've encountered is the exponential growth of the possible utterances I need to handle when substituting similar words.

It starts out easy...

"Alexa, show me a photo/picture/image"

Ok that's three possible utterances...

"Alexa show me a photo/picture/image of a boat/ship"

Now we're up to 6. This is starting to look dicey.

"Alexa show me a large/big, photo/picture/image of a violet/purple boat/ship on the ocean/sea"

48 combinations. You see the problem.

This is a quick-and-dirty script for generating large combinations of words and phrases so you can paste them into the developer console.

Usage

Edit the code to insert your interchangeable words, then run the script. Example:

var bits = [
	["show me a", "display a"],
	["picture", "photo", "image"],
	["of a"],
	["violet", "purple"],
	["boat", "ship"]
];

results in

show me a picture of a violet boat
show me a picture of a violet ship
show me a picture of a purple boat
show me a picture of a purple ship
show me a photo of a violet boat
show me a photo of a violet ship
show me a photo of a purple boat
show me a photo of a purple ship
show me an image of a violet boat
show me an image of a violet ship
show me an image of a purple boat
show me an image of a purple ship
display a picture of a violet boat
display a picture of a violet ship
display a picture of a purple boat
display a picture of a purple ship
display a photo of a violet boat
display a photo of a violet ship
display a photo of a purple boat
display a photo of a purple ship
display an image of a violet boat
display an image of a violet ship
display an image of a purple boat
display an image of a purple ship

Then you just ctrl-c the block of utterances and paste them into the Alexa developer console under the bulk import option.

Developing

Scripting the English language is challenging because of all the edge cases. I was in a rush when I created this and did not attempt to handle things like "an x-ray" or "an m and m" or "an honest person" (although I did handle "a user", etc).

Improvements

I'm sure this can easily be improved. And should probably be recursive or something. Please submit a pull request if you want to add code to handle edge cases.