Superhero Sidekick

Superhero Sidekick Party Rock app
Black Widow - generated by Party Rock image widget
Black Widow and Harley Quinn, together again, generated by Party Rock image widget
Loki and Scepter - generated by Party Rock image widget
Spiderwoman - - generated by Party Rock image widget
Batman Noir and Sidekick - - generated by Party Rock image widget
I have no idea - - generated by Party Rock image widget
Harley Quinn as Black Widow - generated by Party Rock image widget
Anime Moonstruck - generated by Party Rock image widget

Introduction

Dive into a world where every choice spins the narrative, powered by Anthropic's Claude Instant engine, and brought to life through a dynamic chorus of Alexa voices. It's not just an RPG; it's a real-time, voice-driven theater in your home, blending cutting-edge generative AI with the magic of storytelling. Join us and make every tale an unforgettable, multi-voiced journey

What it does

Superhero Sidekick revolutionizes storytelling by weaving the power of generative AI with the charm of voice-driven narratives. This ingenious application syncs with Amazon's Alexa to breathe life into text-generated adventures, utilizing Anthropic's Claude Instant engine. As the story unfolds, Superhero Sidekick meticulously assigns distinct Alexa voices to characters, creating an immersive, multi-voiced experience akin to a live theater performance. Whether it's the valiant hero, the cunning villain, or the wise guide, each character is vividly brought to life, ensuring that every twist and turn in the story is not just heard, but felt. With the Superhero Sidekick Chrome extension and Alexa skill, users are not just playing a game; they're stepping into the heart of an ever-evolving story that responds dynamically to their choices, making each adventure uniquely their own. This isn't just an advancement in RPGs; it's a groundbreaking step forward in interactive storytelling, making complex narratives accessible, engaging, and wonderfully entertaining for everyone, regardless of their familiarity with role-playing games or generative AI technology.

How we built it

Superhero Sidekick is comprised of 3 main components

Party Rock app

The heart of Superhero Sidekick is the Party Rock chat widget that interacts with you and uses the Claude Instant LLM to create story text in real-time, adjust the path and plot of the story in reaction to your choices. The main prompt instructs the Claude Instant engine to create text in a specific format consisting of a story update paragraph followed by a list of choices with action phrases for easy voice navigation using an Alexa device.

Chrome Extension

The Superhero Sidekick Chrome extension has a background script that communicates with a back-end server, relaying new content generated by the Party Rock app to the Alexa device via a websocket connection with the back-end server. The back-end server maintains the link between Chrome extension instance ID and the Amazon ASK account ID belonging to the Alexa device. When a new user choice is reported to the back-end server by the Alexa device, it is routed to the Chrome extension background script who then it turn notifies the content script. The content script handles the majority of the page content monitoring and parsing activities, sending new story content to the back-end server to be relayed to the Alexa device for playback.

** Alexa Skill **

The Superhero Sidekick is responsible for interacting directly with the user, playing new content to the user using a suite of Alexa voices automatically assigned to each "character" in the RPG story, creating a fun, exciting performance the user can truly enjoy.

Challenges we ran into

It took quite a bit of prompt refactoring and many code optimizations in all 3 pieces to keep the response time under the maximum of 8-seconds allowed by the Alexa server, to keep the skill from timing out. It works now, but there is more work to be done, including streaming progressive audio to the user as it the LLM streams it to reduce the lengthy pause during text generation sesions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works! It's a three-ring circus that actually expresses playfully the amazing text generation capabilities of Anthropic's Claude engine.

What we learned

After many years of waiting for Jarvis, or the Start Trek AI computer, we finally have genuine, endless entertainment created by artificial minds to entertain real human beings. The author of the "1001 nights of Scheherazade" would marvel at this digital embodiment of his epic work, as an artificial entity spins and endless parade of stories with infinite variety, each one tailored individually to the personal pleasure of the individual listener.