Explore further

You've finished the walkthrough. These activities take you further: try different channels into the same contact centre, see the architecture behind the scenes, and weigh up what your council would need before going to production.

Safe to explore: the sandbox is yours. Everything here is designed for experimentation. Nothing you do can break it.

Choose your path

Service Manager

Focus on resident experience and end-to-end journeys

Time: 20 minutes

Technical Lead

Focus on architecture, integration points, and production considerations

Time: 30 minutes

Experiments to try

Try a real Connect chat (3 minutes)

What you'll learn: Chat goes through the same intent and Bedrock pipeline as voice. You don't need a phone to demo it.

  1. Open the companion app. Visit the CompanionUrl from the stack outputs in your browser.
  2. Wait for the welcome message. The bot greets you in the chat transcript pane on the left.
  3. Ask about bin day. Type 'When is my bin collection in AL3?' and press Enter.
  4. Watch the answer. Bedrock returns a knowledge-grounded answer and the Connect Case panel updates.

You should see: You receive an Aldershire-specific answer in seconds, with a case reference attached.

Watch for:

  • The answer is council-specific, not generic
  • A Connect Case appears in the middle pane
  • The step indicator advances as you progress
Call from your browser, no phone (4 minutes)

What you'll learn: A WebRTC call into Connect is a real contact, indistinguishable from a phone call to the bot.

  1. Open the companion app. Visit the CompanionUrl in a browser that supports WebRTC.
  2. Click 'Call via browser'. Allow microphone permission when prompted.
  3. Speak naturally. Try 'I want to report a pothole on Aldermarket Lane.'
  4. Hear the bot respond. The same Lex and Bedrock pipeline answers as it would over the phone.

You should see: You finish a council interaction without needing a phone number.

Watch for:

  • Connection takes about 4 seconds
  • The bot voice is the same en-GB voice you hear over the phone
  • The Connect Case workflow is identical to the phone path
Add video and screen sharing to a call (3 minutes)

What you'll learn: The same browser call can carry video and a screen capture. Useful for showing damage or council notices.

  1. Start a web call. Click 'Call via browser' in the companion app.
  2. Click 'Add video'. Allow camera permission. A tile appears showing your camera feed.
  3. Click 'Share screen'. Pick a window or your full desktop. The tile updates to show the screen capture.
  4. End the call. Click 'End call'. The contact closes cleanly.

You should see: An agent on the workspace side could see exactly what the resident sees.

Watch for:

  • A single button toggles each capability
  • No extra deployment needed, both features are part of the same Chime SDK session
Report fly-tipping over the phone with a photo (5 minutes)

What you'll learn: Voice and photo on different channels join onto a single case. The bot reads back a friendly case number.

  1. Dial the council number. Call the real UK number from the stack outputs.
  2. Say 'I want to report fly tipping'. The bot recognises FlyTip and asks you to use the photo upload simulator.
  3. While on hold, open the simulator. In the companion app, type your phone number and choose any image of rubbish.
  4. Hear the readback. While hold music plays, the bot polls. When the photo is processed, it reads back a numeric case reference for you to write down.

You should see: One case captures both your call and your photo, with a reference number that matches what the agent sees.

Watch for:

  • Hold music plays between checks
  • The reference number is human-readable, not a UUID
  • The same case appears in the agent workspace
Try a 'not a council issue' photo (2 minutes)

What you'll learn: Bedrock can decline non-council photos cleanly rather than forcing them into the wrong category.

  1. Open the simulator pane. Companion app, right-hand pane.
  2. Upload a selfie or food photo. Anything not council-related: a pet, a meme, scenery.
  3. Read the friendly decline. The bot replies 'That doesn't look like something the council can help with…' and does not create a case.

You should see: No case is created. The simulator shows a polite decline.

Watch for:

  • No fly-tip false positive
  • The Connect Case panel stays empty for that upload
Call (or chat) in another language (4 minutes)

What you'll learn: The bot auto-detects the caller's language from the first reply and switches voice + answers to match. English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Polish run end-to-end through Polly neural voices and the same Aldershire knowledge base. Welsh and Romanian use Polly standard voices and Bedrock-only intent classification (no Lex).

  1. Dial the council number. Call the real UK number from the stack outputs.
  2. Hear the English greeting. The greeting stays English because the bot doesn't know your language yet.
  3. Reply in your language. Try Italian: 'Quando passa il netturbino?' Or Polish: 'Kiedy odbiór śmieci?' Or Welsh: 'Pryd mae'r sbwriel yn cael ei gasglu?'
  4. Listen to the response. The voice switches to the appropriate Polly voice (Bianca, Ola, Gwyneth, etc.) and the answer is in your language, drawn from the same knowledge base.
  5. Try the chat too. Open the companion app and type a question in Polish or Spanish; the bot replies in the same language and the LANG badge in the header shows the detected code.

You should see: Two channels (voice + chat) work in eight languages, with documented quality caveats for Welsh, Romanian, and Polish.

Watch for:

  • First English greeting then language switch from turn two onwards
  • Bedrock answers stay grounded in the English Aldershire knowledge base
  • Welsh and Romanian sound robotic because Polly only has standard voices for them
  • Polish transcripts show PII unredacted (Contact Lens limitation)
Open the bespoke council dashboard in the agent workspace (3 minutes)

What you'll learn: The Connect agent workspace can host council-branded apps alongside the Contact Control Panel, Customer Profiles, and Cases.

  1. Log in for emergency access. From the AWS console, open Amazon Connect, find your instance, click 'Log in for emergency access.'
  2. Switch to Agent Workspace. Top right, pick 'Agent Workspace' from the workspace dropdown.
  3. Open the council dashboard. The bespoke agent.html page on the same CloudFront distribution serves a branded landing for the council.

You should see: You see a council-branded view alongside the standard Connect agent panes.

Watch for:

  • The header reads NDX:Try {your council name}
  • A caller-lookup form is ready for a phone search
  • Quick links to the simulator, chat, and web call panes

Architecture tours

Architecture at a glance (4 minutes)

What you'll learn: How a resident's voice, chat, and photo become one Connect Case.

  1. Inbound channel. The resident dials the real UK number, opens chat, or starts a web or video call. All three create an Amazon Connect contact and run the same MainContactFlow.
  2. Intent classification. Lex v2 classifies what the caller said. A multi-intent decomposer Lambda (Bedrock Nova Pro) picks up to four service intents per turn for layered distress.
  3. Knowledge-grounded answer. Bedrock Knowledge Base retrieves Aldershire-specific docs. Bedrock Guardrails anonymise PII in the response.
  4. Case unification. Customer Profiles links the same caller across phone, chat, and the photo simulator. Connect Cases creates exactly one ticket per resident per topic.
  5. Photo channel. Photos uploaded through the simulator (or any future messaging bridge) are described by Bedrock Nova Pro vision and stamped onto the same case.
  6. Read-back. When the resident dials again, the contact flow finds the open case, reads back the resolution, and disconnects with a numeric case reference.
Console tour: see it live (8 minutes)

What you'll learn: Find each AWS resource powering the demo in your sandbox account.

  1. Amazon Connect instance. Console > Amazon Connect > your instance > Overview. Note the access URL and the 'Log in for emergency access' link.
  2. Contact flow. Routing > Flows > ndx-try-aicc-main-flow. The graphical view shows the IVR logic, the Lex hand-off, and the FlyTip photo-wait branch with hold music.
  3. Customer Profiles domain. Console > Amazon Connect > Customer Profiles. Search by phone number to see synthetic profiles created on inbound.
  4. Connect Cases domain. Console > Amazon Connect > Cases. See cases with intent_category, severity, photo attachments, and customer linkage.
  5. Bedrock Knowledge Base. Console > Amazon Bedrock > Knowledge Bases. Open the council corpus to see ingested documents and chunking.
  6. Q in Connect (Wisdom). Connect admin > Q in Connect. The same knowledge base drives in-call assistance for live agents.

Production considerations

PII handling boundary (3 minutes)

PII never leaves the Connect boundary in the clear. Contact Lens redacts at the instance level, so only redacted segments persist. Bedrock Guardrails also anonymise model output.

Before going to production, check:

  • Run a sample of redacted segments past your DPO to confirm coverage matches your DPIA
  • Decide retention for redacted DynamoDB records and the share PDF
  • Confirm CloudTrail and Connect contact-evaluation logs meet your records management policy
Outbound calling restrictions (2 minutes)

AWS blocks outbound calls to 447 prefixes by default for new accounts. The flow handles this gracefully by asking the caller for a landline number.

Before going to production, check:

  • Raise an AWS Support case with your business reason to lift the outbound mobile block
  • Decide whether outbound voice callback is required, or whether SMS via a partner is sufficient
Knowledge base content scope (2 minutes)

The knowledge base is seeded from the documents/ tree at deploy time. Bumping the CorpusVersion parameter forces a re-ingest after you sync new files.

Before going to production, check:

  • Replace synthetic Aldershire docs with your council's actual service pages, policies, and FAQs
  • Set up an editorial review process for knowledge base content
  • Decide whether to add per-team glossaries (for example, for Welsh place names or local jargon)