Newzery

the article2video messenger bot
image : imagery : : news : newzery!

Inspiration

Assuming that advertising revenue is a reasonable proxy for attention, it turns out that humans like pictures more than text, and moving pictures most of all; so it has gone on the Internet.[source].

What it does

This bot takes the URL of a web-based content article and automatically generates a motion-video out of it.

How I built it

Newzery uses moviepy for making a video out of text, images, and sound. The article of content is scrapped using newspaper. The sound effects are determined by the sentiment analysis of the content, which is done using nltk. The bot is made using flask. Facebook messaging API is integrated with the bot using pymessenger. The bot is hosted on Heroku free tier.

Challenges I ran into

Compression of video to match the attachment file limit of messenger API
Handling requests to avoid exceeding of memory quota on Heroku free tier
Setting up the production environment for moviepy: installing ImageMagick on Heroku

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

automated delivery of personalized media over messenger
enhanced retention of article content in users' memory
a major step towards an end-to-end pipeline for on-demand article2video generation