This document discusses Amazon Polly and Amazon Lumberyard. It provides an overview of Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service, describing its features and use cases such as for game development. It then discusses Amazon Lumberyard, a game engine, and how video games are produced using tools like cloud-assisted production and new experiences enabled by technologies like Amazon Polly.

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Robin Dautricourt, Sr. Product Manager
Felix Duchesneau, Software Development Manager,
11/14/2017
Bringing Characters to Life with
Amazon Polly Text-to-Speech

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Amazon Polly
• What is Amazon Polly?
• A short overview of how
Text-to-Speech is produced.
• Text-to-Speech features.
• Game development use case.
Amazon Lumberyard
• What is Lumberyard?
• A short overview of how video
games are made.
• Cloud assisted production tools.
• New experiences made possible.
Agenda for Today

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What is Amazon Polly?
• AWS service that converts text into lifelike speech
• 50 voices across 24 languages
• Low latency responses allow developers to build real-time
systems
• Developers can store, replay, and distribute generated
speech

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Text-to-Speech Development
Text
Text normalization
Grapheme-to-phoneme
conversion
Waveform
generation
Speech
She has $20 in her pocket.
she has twenty dollars in her pocket
ˈ ʃ i ˈ h æ z ˈ t w ɛ n . t i ˈ d ɑ . ɫ ə ɹ z ˈ ɪ n ˈ h ɝ ɹ ˈ p ɑ . k ə t

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Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Features
<speak>I can speak normally,
<prosody volume="x-loud">or I can speak in a louder voice.</prosody>
</speak>
<speak>When I get excited,
<prosody rate="x-fast">I start to speak very
fast.</prosody></speak>
<speak>Sometimes when I get nervous,
<prosody pitch="high">my pitch goes way up.</prosody></speak>

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Speech Marks Feature
Synchronize Speech for an Enhanced Visual
Experience
• Speech Marks: additional metadata stream
• Timing information for visemes, words, sentences,
SSML
Sample use cases:
• Karaoke-style text highlighting
• Facial animation (lip-syncing)

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Amazon Polly Use Cases
Telephony
/ IVR
Special Needs
AI Assistant
AI AnnouncerVideo
Voice-Over
Navigation Content
Creation
Education
Technology
Podcasts
Game Development
• Pre-Production Speech
• Character Casting
• Directing (with SSML)
• Real-time Speech
• Store and Replay

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Amazon Polly for Game Development -
Amazon Lumberyard Use Case

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What is Lumberyard?
Amazon Lumberyard is a free AAA game engine deeply
integrated with AWS and Twitch – with full source.

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Amazon Polly

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Video game development in a nutshell

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Producing a video game
Time
ProductionPre-productionConception
GameLaunches
Post-launch …

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Producing a video game
The environment will be under construction for most of the
production
The player, the NPCs, the gameplay mechanics, the story
telling need to be perfectly adapted to the environment
The assets: Characters, animations, props, audio will also
be under development for most of the production

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Producing a video game
Time
Produce 100s of characters
Put assets and characters in world
Build the world with tools in development
Produce 1000s of assets
Implement & improve gameplay mechanics
Playtest, Iterate, find and improve the fun
Story telling through cinematics and scripted events
Signs and feedback
Fix 1000s of bugs
Missions and level design
Assembleeverything
Hopeforthebest
R&D and Experimentation
Develop new tools to build faster
Optimize
Prepare day1 patch

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Placeholders will be used until the very end
- Reserve “physical” space
- Reserve memory budget
- Reserve time (timing-wise)
- Iterate and playtest
- Test if there is enough variety
- Test the localization
- …

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Story telling - consistent story in a consistent world.
The story will be told by:
- Cinematics
- Scripted events
- Ambiance dialogues and audio
- Props, accessories
- Lighting
- Weather conditions

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Game ≠ Story
Find the fun through play tests and iteration

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Game mechanics
Player must understand what is going on.
Player must understand gameplay mechanics
Gameplay mechanics == computer algorithms
Player understands computer algorithms
How?
Signs and feedback

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Signs and feedback
- UI elements
- Sounds
- Ambient dialogues
- NPC dialogues
- FX

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Gameplay mechanics – An example

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A stealth game with a gameplay loop of 4 states
CombatSearch
Alert Relaxed

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Relaxed state
Wait Patrol
Enemy seen Enemy heard

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Player has been momentarily seen or heard
Alert
“Did you hear something?”
“What was that?”
“What was that noise?”
“Huh?”

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Alert state
Unseen
(--)
Seen/heard
(++)
Detected!

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Player did not hide soon enough
Search
Show yourself!
Over there! I think I saw something.
Who’s there?

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Search
Search
“Come out we don’t have all night.”
“Come out, come out wherever you are!”
“Hope you have good life insurance dude.”
“It takes some guts to come in here uninvited.”

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Investigate last
known position
Search around
last known
position
Spread
Search state
Enemy
seen
Enemy
heard

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Enemies are attacking – Time to run or fight
Combat
“Get him!”
“There he is!”
“Attaaaaaaack!”

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Cloud assisted production tools

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Three Parts of a Cloud Gem
Backend
infrastructure
Client Component Cloud Gem Portal
Plugin

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New runtime game experiences made possible

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