Following the recent Amazon Prime day, I thought it was time to jump on the home assistant bandwagon – £80 seemed a pretty good deal for an Alexa Echo.

If you’ve not tried writing Alexa skills there are some really good blog posts to help get started at: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2016/12/12/amazon-alexa-skill-using-c-sharp-dotnet-core.aspx

Skills can be underpinned by an AWS lambda function. In experimenting with writing these I’ve started putting together some helpers which remove a lot of the boiler-plate code needed for C# Alexa Lambda functions, including some fluent tools for running unit tests.

The code and some examples are available at https://github.com/boro2g/AlexaCore. Hopefully you will find them help get your skills off the ground!