Creating handlers

When our intents are triggered by a user saying one of our utterances, we need to handle that inside our code. To do this, we create an object containing a method for each of our intents. Currently, we only have one hello intent, so we only need to create one handler:

const helloHandler = {
    canHandle(handlerInput) {
        return handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.type === 'IntentRequest' &&
            handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.intent.name === 'hello';
    },
    handle(handlerInput) {
        const speechText = `Hello from Sam's new intent!`;

        return handlerInput.responseBuilder
            .speak(speechText)
            .getResponse();
    }
};

This hello handler has two parts: canHandle and handle. The canHandle function decides whether this handler can deal with this request, returning true if it can and false if it can't. This is calculated using the request type and intent name. If both match, then this is the correct handler. handle is telling Alexa how to respond. For this intent, all we want Alexa to do is to say Hello from Sam's new intent! and then get the user's next message.

Now we need to add our helloHandler to our skill.

We can add multiple handlers by passing them as multiple parameters to the .addRequestHandlers method:

exports.handler = Alexa.SkillBuilders.custom()
    .addRequestHandlers(
        helloHandler)
    .lambda();