Alexa Meet LUIS

LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) is a research project that uses a Bing Cognitive AI service to match spoken dialog with an intent.  When creating a LUIS app, you'll create an Intent Schema and Sample Utterances similar to that in an Alexa skill.

Once you have a LUIS application built, you need to train it to create its internal models that it uses to predict which intent best matches the phrase sent to it.  It responds with a JSON object that includes your intent names and the scores that represent how well that phrase matched an existing intent.

I wanted to leverage the power of LUIS to determine what intent has the highest probability to match a spoken phrase, when I didn't include that phrase as a sample utterance in my Alexa skill.

This required me to create a catchall intent.  The schema for this intent is exactly like I described in a previous blog article about matching all the spoken words...  Polly Want a Cracker? A Simple Alexa Skill that Echoes Your Words

Once I created a skill that had a number of intents, along with my catchall intent, I began testing phrases that were not included in my sample utterances.  I soon realized that the AVS already performs LUIS-like language understanding.  It was extremely difficult to ever have the Alexa skill choose my catchall intent.

The one way I could see using LUIS now, would be to build the Polly Want a Cracker skill.  Then use LUIS to define my intents and slots (which are called entities in LUIS).  LUIS has a great service that provides active learning in your app.  LUIS stores the new phrases it hears and lets you review them and label new entities.  This is not available in Alexa right now, so a skill developer has a difficult time understanding what phrases people are trying in their skill that may not be working.