Spring Skills is an extension to the Spring Framework that allows the creation of voice-enabled applications. Spring Skills initially targets Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant voice platforms, but may later be extended to support other voice assistants (such as Microsoft’s Cortana).
The way we communicate with our applications is an ever-evolving experience. Punch cards gave way to keyboards. Typing on keyboards was then supplemented by pointing and clicking with a mouse. And touch screens on our phones, tablets, and computers are now a common means of communicating with applications.
These all lack one thing, however: They aren’t natural.
As humans, we often communicate with each other through speech. If you were to walk up to another human and start tapping them, you’d likely be tapped (or punched) in response. But when we talk to our applications, we communicate on the machine’s terms, with keyboards, mice, and touch screens. Even though we may use these same devices to communicate with other humans, it’s really the machine we are communicating with—and those machines relay what we type, click, and tap to another human using a similar device.
Voice user-interfaces (Voice UIs) enable us to communicate with our application in a human way. They give our applications the means to communicate to us on our terms, using voice. With a voice UI, we can converse with our applications in much the same way we might talk with our friends.
Voice UIs are truly the next logical step in the evolution of human-computer interaction. And this evolutionary step is long overdue. For as long as most of us can remember, science fiction has promised us the ability to talk to our computers. The robot from Lost in Space, the Enterprise computer on Star Trek, Iron Man’s Jarvis, and HAL 9000 (okay, maybe a bad example) are just a few well-recognized examples of science fiction promising a future where humans and computers would talk to each other.
Our computers are far more powerful today than the writers of science fiction would have imagined. And the tablet that Captain Picard used in his ready room on Star Trek: The Next Generation is now available with the iPad and other tablet devices. But only recently have voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant given us the talking computer promised to us by science-fiction.
With human-to-human communication, it can sometimes be awkward to know what to say to another person, especially if you’re just getting to know them. Since voice-oriented human-to-computer communication is relatively new, it can be just as awkward to know what one might say to their applications and just what kinds of questions one might ask.
Just to give you some ideas, here are a few questions someone might ask their application:
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"Hey Google, let’s go on an adventure." (to launch an adventure game)
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"Alexa, ask vending to double our coffee order next month."
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"Hey Google, how crowded is Disneyland today?"
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"Alexa, ask inventory how many units of SKU RW13972 do we have in our Dallas warehouse?"
These are just a few simple examples, useful for both fun and serious applications. Whichever your application is, Spring Skills will enable you to give your application a voice.
The first attempt at Spring Skills was based on Spring Cloud Function and was focused solely on building Alexa Skills. Although this worked, it had some limitations:
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The size of the function published to AWS Lambda is limited—in terms of both application footprint and memory footprint—limiting skills to either have limited functionality or to ultimately delegate to some other service (REST API) for richer functionality.
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Cold-start for Java applications running in AWS Lambda is still too long for a responsive user experience with Alexa.
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Although Alexa is dominating the voice assistant market, other voice assistants such as Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana should not be disregarded.
Thus, I have decided to retire the original implementation of Spring Skills into the
/attic folder for posterity and start from scratch on a new implementation that
addresses the aforementioned limitations. Specifically…
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Spring Skills will be controller-based, allowing applications to be hosted anywhere and may just be part of an existing Spring application. As such, there will be no limitations imposed on memory or application size, except for those imposed by the chosen platform. (This is directly supported by both Alexa and Google Assistant. If a voice platform does not support direct delegation to a self-hosted service, a proxy function could be developed to delegate to a self-hosted service.)
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Because the application is always running on the host of your choice, there is no delay due to function cold-start. The skill responds immediately, every time. (With the obvious trade-off of no scale-to-zero as you’d get with an AWS Lambda function.)
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Spring Skills will abstract the speech domain away from any particular voice platform, enabling developers to create voice-enabled applications that target any voice platform. Initially, focus will be on Alexa and Google Assistant, the two leaders in this space. Fortunately, these two platforms share many common concepts and similar features, so there’s a lot of common ground for the abstraction to be designed around. Cortana (and maybe eventually Siri) will be considered in later phases of the project.
This is still a work-in-progress. Even though the work completed thus far has proven the ability to create a simple "Hello World" application with Spring Skills, there’s an enormous amount of work yet to be done. Multi-command dialogs, security, and eventual support for Cortana and (big maybe) Siri are just a few of the areas the need further work. If you have any ideas, pull requests, or just want to send good vibes my way, I welcome all kinds of contributions. Thanks, in advance!
At this time, this project is only an experiment and should not be considered an official project of the Spring portfolio, nor should there be any expectation of support from the Spring team or Pivotal Software. While I welcome suggestions, pull-requests, and bug reports, I cannot offer any promises with regard to service-level.