AWS Sumerian - a quick & easy 3D chat bot?

Last week, I republished my "old" article on IBM developerworks as it had defaulted into "draft" mode as I hadn't kept it up to date.  So I make a few tweaks and republished it.

https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/create-a-3d-digital-human-with-ibm-watson-assistant-and-unity3d/ 

I then noticed that I could potentially use it for the content of an internal IBM badge for Intellectual Capital, so I applied for it and got the badge.

https://www.youracclaim.com/badges/b851fb86-d554-4d56-ba80-dc37199a8b94


Then I was asked by the reviewer, James Belton, if he could publish on LinkedIn / Twitter about the article as he was genuinely impressed and was actually going to follow it himself this weekend:

This got me thinking.  Maybe I should do a refresh, start again article, seeing as this article originally started life in early 2018.  I mean technology has moved on soooo much since then, hasn't it?....

.....well, apparently not!....

An internal request came up during this week, requesting to have an "Avatar" as a front for basically a chatbot using IBMs Assistant and Discovery services.... I naturally pointed them at the above article and said, "that'll probably do what you want...knock yourself out".

........

Then, this very morning, via a totally random connection, I stumbled over Amazon Sumarian.

What's that I hear you say? Well.....it looks like AWS took the best elements from Unity and Unreal engine, stripped it down to the bare bones and made their own "Engine" for making 3D, Web GL, VR, AR digital human chatbots, well, you can do so much more, but that's what you can do as well.

https://aws.amazon.com/sumerian/

Bring a new dimension to your web and mobile applications with Amazon Sumerian. 3D immersive experiences are breathing new life into user experiences on the web, increasing customer engagement with brands and improving productivity in the workplace. Amazon Sumerian makes it easy to create engaging 3D front-end experiences and is integrated with AWS services to provide easy access to machine learning, chatbots, code execution and more. As a web-based platform, your immersive experiences are accessible via a simple browser URL and are able to run on popular hardware for AR/VR.

https://docs.sumerian.amazonaws.com/courses/beginner-course/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sumerian/latest/userguide/entities-speech.html

https://docs.sumerian.amazonaws.com/tutorials/create/beginner/dialogue-component/


After digging around deeper, it turns out that Amazon was publishing about this back in early 2018 as well - there must have been something in the air at that time!  Maybe it was something about 2019 or Covid-19 kicking in during 2020, but this stuff seems to have stalled a bit and risks getting lost to time, which would be a shame as it has got great potential and the service from AWS looks to be a "little bit" simpler than doing it via Unity.

I do have a backlog of a lot of things I want to get down during 2021, but maybe a NEW article using AWS Sumarian hooking into IBM Assistant/Discovery (rather than Polly/LEX) will appear on the horizon and refresh this concept.  If nothing else, I can use the new article to help me get my L3/Thought Leader Architect certification later in the year!  LOL - it's all about the badges....


UPDATE:  right, well seeing as I'm not allowed to go anywhere thanks to Lockdown rules (I can get the cars out of the garage, but cannot drive them anywhere, so what's the point?) I thought I'd create a new AWS account and give the above a quick go.... the honest truth is this took me about an hour and I did re-use an existing LEX Bot conversation asset about booking a hotel room, but I'm sure if I spent a bit more time I could write my own one...which I may actually do...

So, getting used to the IDE was the main thing, it did remind me a lot of Unity and a cross-hack of Unreal Engine too, but I got there in the end.  I am still having trouble moving around and seeing stuff properly in the edit camera mode - but the runtime camera mode works okay.  I think I had the same problem when using Unity - I think it might be due to the weird way that the Mac does it's keypad stuff and I'm no expert with that, I do the minimum.

Right, so I got to here:


and I deployed:

https://eu-west-2.sumerian.aws/72343f0630a6435aae40031ca488a3f0.scene

I must say....for something that was knocked up in an hour from never having used these tools before, I am actually impressed.  Yes, I did make it snow, why?  just because I could.  What with all this being OOTB, I am actually very impressed.

I have to stop there as my brain will go off on one about how security is applied, if I were to use this for something like a real use case, how would it handle it etc..etc.. but for now, I just want to appreciate what AWS have done.  I just might write that new article using this and seeing how the <scripting> can be enhanced to use the IBM APIs...

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