Part 1

This is the first in a three part series how to get started with the Alan Platform.

If you would like to follow along with this tutorial yourself, all the files necessary will be available on our GitHub, and you can also follow along using this video tutorial!

To begin, visit https://studio.alan.app/register to create your Alan Studio account. Once you create your account and verify your email, it will direct you to the main project page, so let’s take a look!

Project Page

Once you login, Alan will direct you to: https://studio.alan.app/projects

From here, there are many important things to note.

• Tutorial: In our Menu Bar up top, you will see a button labeled “Tutorial” This will take you to https://alan.app/blog/docs/intro.html Where you can start with our documentation as well as how to integrate your script on any platform.
• Create New Project: Click this button to start a new project quickly and easily.
• Billing: On the top right of our menu bar, you will also see your monthly charge as well as how many free interactions you have left.
• Menu Dropdown: This dropdown has quick shortcuts to our documentation, billing, and settings page.
• Current Projects: The majority of this page will be taken up with cards that display your current project as well as quick analytics.

Creating our first project

Now that we are familiar with our project page, let’s get create our first sample project!

Go ahead and Click “Create New Project”, for this tutorial we are going to name our project, “Food Ordering”.

Scripting UI

Our Scripting page is the main page where you will do all of your scripting and project work that divides into five main sections:

• The menu bar at the top
• Our Scripts Navigation pane on the left
• Our Script Development Window in the middle
• The Debugging Pane on the right
• The Logs bar featuring all input/output phrases and unrecognized phrases.

Script Basics

For this tutorial, we are going to be focusing on creating a fully voice enabled Food Ordering application. You will notice that the Script Development window is prompting us to create a new script, so let’s go ahead and add one now.

Click the “Create New Script” button and we will add a predefined script template called “Food_Ordering”.

Quick Tip: Go through our predefined scripts to learn more about the features of Alan and generate new script ideas!

Once you add your new script, you will see it open in our main window. The Source Code for this application is also available in our GitHub so you can download and follow along.

Let’s try out this script by clicking on the Alan Button and saying, “Order two pepperoni pizzas”. 

From here, we can see how Alan associates our keywords with:

An intent on line 296:

intent(`(add|I want|order|get|and|) $(NUMBER) $(ITEM ${ITEMS_INTENT})`,

And a response on line 351:

p.play(answer);

A sample with more details on the Answer function is found on line 320.

If you look in the debugging chat, you can see the actual instructions that are being sent to the application in order to achieve commands.

Now that we have created our first project and understand the basics of Voice Scripts, we’ll give you some time to play around with your project and adjust the scripts as you wish. We’ll see you in the next blog post where we will discuss more about customizing scripts, version control, development stages, and logs.