HaikuBot

godly predictions

Inspiration

We think that framing the world around in the form of the three-lined haiku offers a glorious new perspective on our surroundings as well as provoking meaningful and stimulating lines of thought.

What it does

Running as a Facebook Messenger bot, the user can send a picture file (one which has either been saved on the user's phone or taken in the moment) to HaikuBot and receive in return three lines of wisdom and beauty.

How I built it

We used the Clarifai Computer Vision API to generate a list of keywords pertaining to the user's image, then fed those keywords into a randomly selected Haiku-generating algorithm which we programmed from scratch. The result is then fed back to the Facebook bot and outputted to the user via Facebook messenger. The whole thing was hosted on Heroku and built with Node.js.

Challenges I ran into

The haiku algorithms were tricky to program. First we had to account for having the right amount of syllables per line. After that- nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and other lexical categories had to be slotted strategically into each line for the sentence to make any sense. We actually have several different ways of organizing the poem that the image can fall into.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Neither of us had worked with backend or Node before. It was amazing to learn about the backend for the first time at HackNYU. Also, we're proud of taking an overnight 12 hour bus from Canada to get here.