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  Used for avatar generation

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  Cover

📸 Inspiration

Scrolling X for trending news is time-consuming, and most summaries are text-only. We wanted something that feels like a real news broadcast—with a custom anchor done by a person of our choice, real videos, and hands-free playback through our robot Bruno.

📌 What it does

HashtagTV uses xAI Grok (reasoning + xAI Voice TTS) together with the X API, SadTalker, and FFmpeg to automatically convert trending content from X into fully-produced AI news videos. It fetches live trending topics, asks Grok why a topic is trending right now, speaks it using xAI Voice, animates a talking avatar, merges it with the original X video, and uploads the result directly to YouTube. Bruno can play the newest broadcast on command: “Hey Bruno, what’s the latest news?”

🛠️ How we built it

Part A — AI News Production

1. Fetch top X trends

2. Pull recent video tweets

3. Use Grok for <50-word anchor-style explanation

4. Convert to voice using xAI Voice

5. Animate avatar with SadTalker

6. Merge avatar + tweet video via FFmpeg

7. Auto-upload to YouTube

Part B — Jarvis-style Voice Trigger

1. Bruno listens for wake command

2. Automatically plays the latest broadcast

3. Otherwise responds normally using Grok

🧩 Challenges we ran into

• Integrating xAI Voice with SadTalker

• Slow avatar generation due to local inference + no GPU

• Fullscreen YouTube blocked by security restrictions

• SSH access to the robot was hard due to firewalls

• Had to rely on hotspots to get connectivity

• Running compute-heavy tasks on a robot was tough but fun

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

• End-to-end automation from trending detection to finished news broadcast

• Real video merging and avatar animation

• Voice-triggered playback on a physical robot

📚 What we learned

• How to combine X API, xAI Grok, and xAI Voice

• Local avatar animation pipelines

• Video automation and publishing

• Voice-triggered robotic UX

🚀 What’s next for HashtagTV — reported by your favorite celebrity

• Real-time emergency alerts

• Multilingual anchors

• More avatar personalities (including celebrity-style presenters)

Built With

• fastapi
• grok
• grok-tts
• python
• ros
• sadtalker
• x-api
• xai-api