My Friend

To meet these objectives, I contributed to developing My Friend, an AI-powered voice assistant, using OpenAI, ReactJS, NodeJS, ExpressJS, AWS, and Postgres. We focused on integrating AWS services and implementing real-time communication to enhance the system’s performance and user experience.

‍

AWS Service Integration

• Utilised AWS Transcribe for speech-to-text conversion, allowing the system to accurately understand children’s spoken words.
• Integrated AWS Polly to generate natural-sounding voice responses, making interactions more engaging and accessible for young users.
• Used DynamoDB and Postgres for managing both session data and longer-term contextual information. Children’s responses were saved in a vector database, maintaining conversation continuity and enabling personalised interactions over time.

‍

Real-Time Communication

Implemented WebSockets for real-time interactions between children and the voice assistant, ensuring seamless communication without delays.

Built a system that supports real-time guidance, helping children through problems in an interactive and dynamic way.

Created an engaging 3D character, similar to Talking Tom, using Three.js and React Three Fiber. This interactive character speaks and listens like a cartoon, adding a visual, fun element to the platform. The character reacts to the child’s voice inputs, animating and speaking back in real time, making the entire experience more immersive and enjoyable for children.

Architectural Optimization

Optimised the platform’s architecture for scalability and efficiency, ensuring smooth performance as the number of users grows.

Leveraged AWS S3 for secure storage of audio files and conversation data, minimising latency and improving the overall system reliability.

‍

‍

‍

My Friend successfully met the client’s goals, creating a voice assistant that is friendly, interactive, and effective in helping children solve problems. Key outcomes included:

‍

• Personalised Interaction: The assistant builds on previous conversations, maintaining context through the vector database. This allows it to better understand each child and provide personalised guidance, making the system feel more like a trusted companion.
• Enhanced Engagement: Through real-time communication powered by WebSockets, children could interact with the assistant naturally, increasing engagement and making problem-solving more interactive.
• Accurate Voice Processing: The combination of AWS Transcribe and Polly provided highly accurate speech recognition and response generation, ensuring that children were understood clearly and received lifelike, friendly replies.
• Scalability and Efficiency: The optimised architecture allowed the system to handle multiple concurrent users while maintaining high performance. AWS service integration ensured efficient storage and communication, making the platform cost-effective and scalable for future growth.
• Safe and Friendly Environment: The voice assistant provided a safe and welcoming environment where children could express their concerns and receive guidance, contributing to their problem-solving abilities in an interactive and engaging manner.

‍

By integrating advanced AI and AWS services, My Friend created a reliable, scalable, and personalised voice assistant for children, fostering engagement and problem-solving in a fun and accessible way.

‍