Before the introduction of Apple’s “Siri” in 2010, Artificial Intelligence voice assistants were no more than science fiction. Fast forward to today, and you will find them everywhere from in your phone helping you navigate your contacts and calendar, to in your home helping you around the house. Each smart assistant has its pros and cons, and everyone has their favorite assistant. Over the last few years I have really enjoyed working with Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant. I began working with Alexa during my summer internship at Travelers in 2016. I attended a “build night” after work where we learned how to start developing with Amazon Web Services and the Alexa platform. Since then, I’ve developed six different skills and received Amazon hoodies, t-shirts, and Echo Dots for my work.
So I mentioned “skills”, but I didn’t really explain them. An Alexa “skill” is like an app on your phone. These skills use the natural language processing and other capabilities of the Amazon “Lex” platform to do whatever you can think of. Some of the skills I have made in the past include a guide to West Hartford, a UConn fact generator, and a quiz to determine if you should order pizza or wings. However, while working in the OPIM Innovate lab I have found some other uses for Alexa that go beyond novelties. The first was using Alexa to query our Splunk instance. Lucky for us, the Splunk developer community has already done a lot of the leg work for us. The “Talk to Splunk with Amazon Alexa” Splunk add-on handles most of the networking between the Alexa and your Splunk instance. In order for Alexa Splunk to securely communicate we had to set up a private key, a self-signed certificate, and a Java keystore. After doing a few basic configuration steps on the Splunk side, you can start creating your Splunk Alexa Skill. This skill will be configured to talk to your splunk instance, but it is up to you to determine what queries to run. You can create “Intents” that will take an english phrase and convert that to a splunk query that you write. However, you can also use this framework to make Alexa do things like play sounds or say anything you want. For example, I used the Splunk skill we created to do an “interview” with Alexa about Bank of America’s business strategy for my management class. Below you can find links to the Alexa Add-On for Splunk as well as a video of that “interview”.
By: Tyler Lauretti, Senior MIS Major
Talk to Splunk with Amazon Alexa: https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/3298/
Alexa Talks Strategy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYaV8ybYV04