Hey Minor,
Welcome to the Community, and thanks for making your first post 
The ^.*? is a regular expression, to learn more about those checkout something like regex101.com, however the best news is that you no longer need to use this for what you’re trying to do.
We now have a beautiful function called extract_number
To use it we have to import it at the top of the file:
from mycroft.util.parse import extract_number
Then your intent handler would look something like:
@intent_handler(IntentBuilder("").require("speakDegrees"))
def handle_question_response(self, message):
utterance = message.data.get('utterance')
num = int(extract_number(utterance))
self.speak_dialog('turning', {'num': num})
If you want to say more than the number itself you can create a dialog/en-us/turn.dialog file, with something like:
turning {num} degrees
With this approach you can delete Words.rx.
Instead of speakDegrees.voc, it might be better to have two vocab terms defined. If you have turn.voc that has turn and degrees.voc that has degrees in them. Then it will return a higher match confidence and avoid triggering if someone is talking about a different type of degree such as the weather. The user could then say
- turn it 90 degrees
- turn 90 degrees
- turn 90 degrees please
- 90 degrees turn
- turn it roughly 90 degrees
- maybe turn it I think 90 degrees should be about right, yeah
You can even add synonyms eg in turn.voc you might have
turn
rotate
twist
which will then allow phrases like “rotate 90 degrees”
Alternatively
If you want to keep it fairly strict to just “turn 90 degrees” it can be useful to use an intent file handler instead. This lets you be very prescriptive and more easily capture specific parts of the utterance. So in a file like vocab/en-us/turn.intent you would put:
turn {num} degrees
Then your handler would look like:
@intent_file_handler('turn.intent')
def handle_question_response(self, message):
spoken_num = message.data.get('num')
num = int(extract_number(spoken_num))
self.speak_dialog('turning', {'num': num})
Hopefully that helps, and please do let us know if you have extra questions.
What sort of Skill are you building?