
The Alexa Skills Kit designed for developers makes complex language processing easy. Developers have to process text and user information in their application and then send the information back to Alexa Skills Kit for it to turn into sound and a response to the Amazon Echo user.
Following are two ways how to process the information provided in developing Alexa IOS App skills.
- Send the data to a predefined URL saved on the internet (a URL runs a background process in your application, running on the server).
With this option, you will have to deal with a number of things that you otherwise wouldn’t have to worry about if you use AWS Lambda to process everything. The user who sends the data request to a URL for an application is redirected to a server for which you need to pay all of the costs to maintain that server, and also ensure that you can scale the server and application which can handle all the possible Alexa requests.
- Use one or moreAWS Lambdafunctions to process Alexa Skills Kit information.
This option allows you to pay only for the processing that you use, and it is bound to scale infinitely due to its running cycle in AWS. AWS Lambda has an enormously generous free tier, and significantly scales down your investment into a new application. We always recommend using AWS lambda for new application development.
The only reason we could understand why people prefer to use a URL pointing to one of their servers is that a complex application built would not translate well using AWS.
We must tell you that there is a huge difference in how apps are released on iOS app store and how skills are released through Amazon’s Alexa service. Both have strict standards in place and do quality check disallowing bad or unusable apps into their service and this is highly appreciable.