In these two articles, I'll show you how to build an assistant that will control a mock smart home thermostat. These articles are intended to get you started with building assistants by creating something relevant in the real world. If you reach the end of the article and want to take a deeper dive or get help with a different chat framework such as Twilio, Drift, Lex, or something else, please leave me a comment. Below is the list of tools and services that we'll cover: I work in product management, and strictly speaking, a product manager doesn't need to possess tech skills to do their work. After all, that's what engineers are for.