Customer Stories / Software & Internet
Soul Machines Taps AWS to Breathe Life into Conversational AI with Digital People
Soul Machines offers an easy, cost-effective, and scalable way for brands to enhance their customer-facing digital people services/ambassadors through its self-service “Digital DNA” software, fueled by Amazon EC2 and Amazon Lex.
Over 4x
higher web conversion rates
27%
increase in customer satisfaction
92%
more effective than a chatbot
Simplified development
Customize, integrate, and rapidly create digital experiences
Overview
Soul Machines redefines human-machine collaboration through hyper-realistic Digital People that are entertaining and practical for countless use cases. The company runs its self-service application, Digital DNA Studio, on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create and deploy Digital People at scale simply and quickly.
Soul Machines leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run applications and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store application data. Its application integrates with Amazon Lex to support natural language processing for applications using voice and text, and Amazon Polly for text to speech. By using AWS to build and launch Digital DNA Studio, Soul Machines has democratized the process of creating Digital People.
Opportunity | Personalizing Digital Interactions through Artificial Intelligence
Founded in 2016, Soul Machines is an avatar animation platform that leverages the power of autonomous animation artificial intelligence (AI) to help brands design human-like experiences for online audiences. Its patented technologies—HumanOS and Digital Brain—redefine human-machine collaboration through hyper-realistic digital characters—known as Digital People—that are both entertaining and practical for countless use cases.
Hilary O'Connor, vice president of sales and partnerships at Soul Machines, explains, “Digital People allow brands to address the need for human connection, entertainment, community, and personalization at scale. Interactions with Digital People are empathetic and drive higher engagement, loyalty, revenue, growth, and data insights.”
Our seamless integration with Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly allows us to expand our product’s reach and empowers users to leverage familiar technologies.”
Trisha Tripathi
Director of Product at Soul Machines
Solution | Helping Customers Integrate Digital People into Conversational Applications
An AWS Partner, Soul Machines relies on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to support its applications and Amazon S3 to store all applications and customer data. The company also uses AWS Secrets Manager to manage API keys and user authentication, and takes advantage of Amazon FSx to store complex Digital People assets. Using AWS, Soul Machines ensures reliable, fast performance for its Digital People, which the company streams to mobile devices and other endpoints. “This is a live interaction that requires high performance and low-latency data transaction, and AWS provides that,” says Trisha Tripathi, director of product at Soul Machines.
To simplify development, Soul Machines leveraged AWS in developing Digital DNA Studio, a suite of creative tools that brands use to create, customize, and deploy Digital People at scale. The solution supports integration to natural language processing (NLP) platforms, including Amazon Lex, a fully managed artificial intelligence (AI) service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text. “Amazon Lex is a high-performing player in the NLP space, and we wanted to make sure our product works natively with its ecosystem,” Tripathi says. Using Digital DNA Studio, companies can seamlessly connect their Digital People to Amazon Lex–powered conversations.
Digital DNA Studio also supports development with Amazon Polly, which uses deep learning to synthesize natural-sounding human speech and convert text to speech.
Outcome | Democratizing Development and Driving Higher Customer Retention
By using AWS to build and launch its Digital DNA Studio, Soul Machines has democratized the process of creating Digital People. Today, hundreds of companies around the world use Soul Machines’ Digital DNA Studio to create their own Digital People and applications. Customers with no AI expertise or experience can easily integrate technologies like Amazon Lex into their solution development, ultimately placing empathetic emotions at the forefront of their brands.
“Because of Amazon Lex and other AWS services, customers don’t have to relearn or unlearn their conversation design practices,” adds Tripathi. “Our seamless integration with Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly allows us to expand our product's reach and empowers users to leverage familiar technologies. With DDNA Studio and AWS, creating and deploying a top-tier digital person is now accessible to anyone."
According to Soul Machines’ internal research, customers in industries ranging from travel to healthcare and insurance see a 5 percent increase in ecommerce conversions, greater than 25 percent increase in customer satisfaction, and net promoter scores of above 80 when they use Soul Machines Digital People. For example, a customer in the real estate industry sought to increase the number of customers booking apartment tours. Interactions with its digital person resulted in a 4 percent conversion rate, which is 8 times higher than industry averages.
From retail and entertainment to healthcare and education, Soul Machines Digital People offers a boundless vision of how businesses and consumers engage with machines in the future. The company continues to build momentum by working closely with AWS, and recently made Digital DNA Studio accessible through AWS Marketplace. To highlight the robust partnership between Soul Machines and AWS, Soul Machines was featured on “Now Go Build,” hosted by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in February 2023. Tripathi says, “Our technology provides a level of personalization that helps users feel much more connected to a brand that they would.”
Learn More
To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/ai.
About Soul Machines
Soul Machines is a leading deep-technology company that combines advancements in generative AI with its industry-defining Autonomous Animation to facilitate the creation of “digitally alive” avatars. Soul Machines’ digital people help brands, celebrities, and influencers create compelling personal experiences at scale for online audiences in every digital world. Its patented technologies, including Digital Brain, are at the forefront of AI research in embodied cognition and cognitive modeling. Founded in 2016 by tech entrepreneur Greg Cross and Academy Award winner Mark Sagar, Soul Machines serves and partners include a range of major global brands and celebrities.
AWS Services Used
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 600 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Learn more »
Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex is a fully managed artificial intelligence (AI) service with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications.
Amazon Polly
Amazon Polly uses deep learning technologies to synthesize natural-sounding human speech, so you can convert articles to speech. With dozens of lifelike voices across a broad set of languages, use Amazon Polly to build speech-activated applications.
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