Building an Alexa Skill with MicroStrategy

On April 19th, 2017 I presented two tracks on the technical capabilities of leveraging Amazon’s Alexa to interact with the MicroStrategy analytics platform and covered use cases such as:

• How many [documents] were created since [March 5th, 2017]?
• What [reports] were created [today]?
• Send the [report] [Sales Analysis] to my email
• Who is online right now?
• Revoke web access for user [username]
• Grant web access for user [username]
• What is my [cost] for the [category] [books]?
• What is my [revenue] for the [region] [central]?

*Note: The words in brackets [] are dynamic text that allow the user to have flexibility in their request.

The purpose of the presentation was to shed light on the kinds of actions an enterprise can take through voice-controlled applications such as the Echo Dot. The overall feedback was incredibly positive and got many people thinking about how they could apply this within their own organizations. My second track was a technical demonstration on how to create an Alexa Skill to ask MicroStrategy how many users were currently online in their system, and so I wanted to make this sample public to those who are interested in investigating this capability for themselves.

Summary

The implementation can be broken down into three main components:

• The Alexa Skill definition: 

  Hosts the utterances and intents the skill should attempt to process

• The AWS Lambda endpoint:

  Contains the backend logic to perform the actions required

• The MicroStrategy Task call:

  A MicroStrategy service call that returns data from MicroStrategy back to the Alexa app