Here's my problem with virtual pets, and honestly with most IoT demos: after the novelty fades, they don't do anything for you. My pet from part 3 has feelings and memory, and I love it, but it contributes nothing to the household.
Time to fix that. In this final part of the series, the pet gets a job: every morning at 7:03, it fetches the AWS "What's New" feed (thanks rss to still be around ❤️), has Amazon Bedrock rewrite the announcements as a briefing in its own excitable little pet voice, has Amazon Polly speak it, and delivers it to the device, where a newspaper badge appears, and tapping it makes the pet read the news to me out loud through the onboard speaker.
It's one of my favorite thing I've built so far this year. My Cloudagotchi is now better informed than I am before my morning hot chocolate (spoiler alert, I don't like cofee... sorry).
In this article, I will walk you through the full pipeline (RSS → Bedrock → Polly → S3 → MQTT → speaker) including the one decision that makes the device side almost embarrassingly simple: asking Polly for the right audio format.
Final code: git checkout article-4, or just main, since this completes the project.
