My Friend
Role / Services
AI & Full Stack Development
Credits
Team Clustox
Location & year
United Kingdom ©
2023
The project
My Friend is a voice assistant for children: Kano, a friendly 3D super-hero bear, talks with a child, gets to know them, and then helps them work through their problems.
The first conversation is about getting to know each other, and the child's answers are kept in a vector database, so every later talk builds on what Kano already knows. The child simply speaks: AWS Transcribe turns the speech into text, OpenAI shapes the reply, and AWS Polly says it back in a natural voice, while Kano listens, talks and animates in real time, a little like Talking Tom.
I was a key contributor, focused on the AWS integration and the real-time communication: WebSockets for the live conversation, S3 for the audio, DynamoDB and Postgres for sessions and long-term context, and an architecture tuned to stay fast and affordable as more children use it. Kano himself is drawn with Three.js and React Three Fiber.
What I built
- AWS Transcribe for speech to text, AWS Polly for a natural voice
- Real-time conversation over WebSockets
- Memory of every child in a vector database
- Sessions and context in DynamoDB and Postgres, audio in S3
- An architecture optimised to stay robust and scalable
- A 3D character that listens, talks and animates in real time
