Validating an Alexa slot type in voiceflow

#1

Hello

This is my first post so first of all I want to express my gratitude for creating such an intuitive and easy to use tool as Voiceflow. Compared with coding all of the interaction and backend in Node this is som much better. I am quite new to the tool but I have already noticed that I am making good progress.

I went through the tutorial Adding slots and intents to our Alexa skills.To get started with slots myself created a very basic skill that just asks for what country you are from and then repeats it back to you. Alexa already has a predefined slot type for country so that is what I am using.

When I test the skill. I notice how it does not validate countries at all. I expect it to be ok. with France, Sweden or Canada for example, but Lalaland or Asgard should trigger the else condition as they are not recognized as countries. I have read the Alexa documentation on slot validation but I am not sure if the out of the box slot types from Alexa comes with their own validation or not. Either way I am looking for a way to validate a slot type directly in Voiceflow. but I have not found any. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

#2

Hi.

https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/slot-type-reference.html

list type of built-in slot type is not perfect and amazon tries to match what user says to any intent as much as they can, even it is recognized wrongly sometimes.

there is no “direct” validation, I think. you shoud validate it if you need.

FYI, If you want to get Country info without asking user, you can use user info block.

#3

Hello @kun432 and thanks for your reply. I built this test skill “get the capital” just to make myself familiar with how to connect with an API. My idea was to validate the country from the first interaction. Once I have the country I would use an api that would return the capital of that country. But the interaction seems to accept anything I say as a country. I think I have to practice more, maybe with custom slots.