Let Alexa ask the user a follow up question (NodeJS)

Question

Background

I have an Intent that fetches some Data from an API. This data contains an array and I am iterating over the first 10 entries of said array and read the results back to the user. However the Array is almost always bigger than 10 entries. I am using Lambda for my backend and NodeJS as my language.

Note that I am just starting out on Alexa and this is my first skill.

What I want to archive is the following

When the user triggers the intent and the first 10 entries have been read to the user Alexa should ask "Do you want to hear the next 10 entries?" or something similar. The user should be able to reply with either yes or no. Then it should read the next entries aka. access the array again.

I am struggling with the Alexa implementation of this dialog.

What I have tried so far: I've stumbled across this post here, however I couldn't get it to work and I didn't find any other examples.

Any help or further pointers are appreciated.

Answer 1

That tutorial gets the concept right, but glosses over a few things.

1: Add the yes and no intents to your model. They're "built in" intents, but you have to add them to the model (and rebuild it).

2: Add your new intent handlers to the list in the .addRequestHandlers(...) function call near the bottom of the base skill template. This is often forgotten and is not mentioned in the tutorial.

3: Use const sessionAttributes = handlerInput.attributesManager.getSessionAttributes(); to get your stored session attributes object and assign it to a variable. Make changes to that object's properties, then save it with handlerInput.attributesManager.setSessionAttributes(sessionAttributes);

You can add any valid property name and the values can be a string, number, boolean, or object literal.

So assume your launch handler greets the customer and immediately reads the first 10 items, then asks if they'd like to hear 10 more. You might store sessionAttributes.num_heard = 10.

Both the YesIntent and LaunchIntent handlers should simply pass a num_heard value to a function that retrieves the next 10 items and feeds it back as a string for Alexa to speak.

You just increment sessionAttributes.num_heard by 10 each time that yes intent runs and then save it with handlerInput.attributesManager.setSessionAttributes(sessionAttributes).