Virtual therapist using AWS Sumerian

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  Programming AWS Sumerian responses using state machines

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  Testing of chatbot in AWS Lex

Inspiration

Learning from experience from previous hackathons, the idea is to create a virtual therapist that is available on demand. This would not only make mental health support more accessible by the general public, it can also reduce the stigma around mental health as people can try therapy for themselves without fear of judgement or any monetary or time commitments.

What it does

It is a chat-bot that a user can directly speak to and it responds in kind. Thus providing a more life-like feel compared to text based chat-bot.

How we built it

The overall appearance of the chat-bot was built using AWS Sumerian. The surroundings was intended to mimic a therapist's office. Gestures were also implemented to make the interaction feel more natural. AWS Lex was used to create a text-based chat-bot and AWS Polly was used to synthesize the text to speech.

Challenges we ran into

1. Getting the lighting source into the desired position was a bit tricky
2. Programming the chat-bot to feel like natural speech was also another issue
3. The chat-bot did not respond to speech using push-to-talk initially(incidentally, I am still not sure what the issue is as it started working out of the blue)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the chat-bot to actually work properly, when solutions of previous hackathons(e.g AWS BuildOn) did not.

What we learned

That cloud computing has a lot to offer if I put in effort to learn about it.

What's next for Virtual therapist using AWS Sumerian

It will most likely be shelved as AR/VR applications is not a field I am currently focused on(although this may change in the future)

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• lex
• polly
• sumerian