Life With Sitecore

Recap As you may recall from the previous post - we enabled the OData Item Service in Sitecore and ran some test queries. Now, it's time to create the "brains" behind the Alexa skill that will make use of the OData Item Service to allow the user to ask Alexa about dogs. In other words - we will give our content a voice :). Note: we will not delve too deeply into hows and why's of Alexa development as there are many ways of doing it in different languages and environments. Alexa 101 Hopefully by now you the reader know what Amazon's Alexa is. If not - welcome to Planet Earth! 1. Alexa is a voice activated device that you can talk to to achieve a (hopefully) useful set of actions (called a Skill). You can activate a specific skill by saying a magic word that is called an invocation. You can think of a skill as an app that is invoked via a HTTP endpoint. 2. Once a skill is invoked - you can say specific phrases or utterances to carry out intents. Inten...

The Story So Far In the previous posts I've described how to enable and use the OData Item Service in Sitecore and also how to set up a Alexa skill. In this final part of the series on Alexa and Sitecore integration - we finally come to the point where we plug in the newest part of Sitecore 9 - namely XConnect. This will allow us to collect data about what is being searched for via our Alexa Skill. Therefore, we are able to glean useful insights into user behavior and use the collected data to personalise content. Connecting the X's If you've read enough about XConnect, you will know that when we collect data, we  associate that data with a contact. Ideally we also try to identify the contact. So far ,we have not really discussed how we know who the user is. This is not really obvious for voice driven experiences as it is for web driven interfaces. For example, to identify a web user - a developer can force them to register or login and identify them with cookies. ...