Building a voice assistant for a React app

What you will learn

• How to add a voice interface to a React app
• How to write simple voice commands for a React app

What you will need

To go through this tutorial, make sure Node.js is installed on your machine.

Step 1. Sign up for Alan Studio

First, we need to sign up for Alan Studio — the web portal where we will create a dialog scenario, or the voice script, for our voice assistant.

1. Go to Alan Studio.

2. Sign up with a Google or GitHub account or with your email address.
   
   

   When you sign up, Alan adds free interactions to your balance to let you get started. To get additional interactions to your balance, sign up with your GitHub account or connect your Alan account with your GitHub account and give stars to Alan repositories.

3. In Alan Studio, click Create Voice Assistant. Select to create an empty project and give it any name you want.

Step 2: Create a React app

Now let's create a simple React app.

1. On your machine, navigate to the folder in which the app will reside and run the following command:

   $ npx create-react-app my-app

2. Switch to the folder with the app:

   $ cd my-app

3. Start the app:

   $ npm start

   

Step 3: Install the Alan Web component

We need to add the Alan Web component to the app. In the app folder, install the Alan Web component with the following command:

$ npm i @alan-ai/alan-sdk-web

Step 4: Add the Alan button to the app

Now we need to update our app to add the Alan button to it.

1. In the src folder, open the App.js file.

2. At the top of the file, add the import statement for the Alan Web component:

   import alanBtn from "@alan-ai/alan-sdk-web";

3. We will use the Effect Hook to add the Alan button to our app. At the top of the file, add the following import statement:

   import React, { useEffect } from 'react';

   For an app that uses React Class Components, you can add the Alan button with componentDidMount(). For details, see React.

4. In the function component, call useEffect:

   function App() {
   
       // Adding the Alan button
   	useEffect(() => {
   		alanBtn({
   			key: 'YOUR_KEY_FROM_ALAN_STUDIO_HERE',
   			onCommand: (commandData) => {
   				if (commandData.command === 'go:back') {
   					// Call the client code that will react to the received command
   				}
   			}
   		});
   	}, []); 
   	return (
   	...
   	);
   }

5. In the key field above, we need to replace YOUR_KEY_FROM_ALAN_STUDIO_HERE with the Alan SDK key for our Alan Studio project. In Alan Studio, at the top of the code editor, click Integrations, copy the value provided in the Alan SDK Key field and paste this value to key.

   function App() {
   
   	useEffect(() => {
   		alanBtn({
   			key: '28b4365114e0f2f67d43485dbc3cb44a2e956eca572e1d8b807a3e2338fdd0dc/stage',
   			onCommand: (commandData) => {
   				if (commandData.command === 'go:back') {
   					// Call the client code that will react to the received command
   				}
   			}
   		});
   	}, []);
   	return (
   	...
   	);
   }

Step 5. Add voice commands

Let's add some voice commands so that we can interact with our React app through voice. In Alan Studio, open the project and, in the code editor, add the following intents:

intent (`What is your name?`, p => {
    p.play(`It's Alan, and yours?`);
});

intent (`How are you doing?`, p => {
    p.play(`Good, thank you. What about you?`);
});

Now in the app click the Alan button and ask: What is your name? and How are you doing? Alan will give responses provided in the intents.