Staging: Change Invocation Names for Different Environments

This page offers a selection of examples to learn how to deploy your Alexa Skill and Google Action to different environments.

• Introduction
• Override the Invocation Name
• Build and Deploy to Alexa
• Additional Options

Introduction

Jovo allows you to deploy your Alexa Skills and Google Actions to different environments, for example local (for local development), dev, and prod (both hosted on AWS Lambda). To learn more about the essentials of different stages, take a look at Configuration > project.js, and the Staging Examples in the Jovo Knowledge Base.

If you have different stages, it's sometimes difficult to figure out which version of your voice app you're currently talking to. This is why Jovo offers a way for you to override the invocation name of your Alexa Skills (unfortunately, Dialogflow does not offer this functionality yet).

Override the Invocation Name

You can change the invocation name by adding the following to any of your stages:

In the below example, we change the invocation name for both the local and dev stage and keep it how it is defined in the en-US.json for the prod stage:

Build and Deploy to Alexa

Before you're deploying the Skill with the new invocation name, you need to build the platform specific files in the platforms folder to change the Alexa Interaction Model there.

For example, this builds the dev stage platform files:

After building the platform files, you can deploy them like this:

NOTE: You don't necessarily need to specify stage in jovo deploy, if you don't use specific deployment information in your project.js (like a specific askProfile or a different skillID). But as you probably do, we recommend specifying the stage parameter.

You can also use the following shortcut for both:

Additional Options

You can find additional options to add to the language model here: project.js Documentation.

For example, you can also add specific intents for certain stages: