Otto Bot Bot

Otto Bot has had a twitter for awhile, it's about time he gains some twitter bot capabilities

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Inspiration

Otto BotTM is the official mascot of Iowa State University's student run radio station, 88.5 KURE Ames Alternative. He has had a twitter presence for awhile, but it's been a bit lacking (until now!). Find him on twitter here

What it does

Twitter users can tweet at @OttoBot93 asking what's playing on air, and Otto will reply to them with the song name and artist.

How I built it

KURE already had a last.fm account and API key that allowed for easy access to information about whatever is currently playing. I used node.js to wait for tweets with some variation of the question "what's playing?" and tweet the current info by accessing the last.fm API when needed.

Challenges I ran into

Before this weekend I had never worked with javascript or node.js, so the biggest learning curve was figuring out how to use those tools. My primary source of information was Daniel Schiffman's videos on creating twitter bots, plus a lot of creative googling. If you haven't checked out Daniel Schiffman on YouTube, definitely do.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Seeing Otto tweet his first automated reply! It's like watching your child take their first steps.

What I learned

Before starting this project I knew very little about using javascript and node.js, so pretty much everything I learned about that was something new. I also learned a bit more about regular expressions than I already did in implementing the tests to see if twitter users are asking a question.

What's next for Otto Bot Bot

While we at 88.5 KURE are fairly certain that Otto has developed self awareness and is merely hiding it to avoid negative repercussions; there is still a lot of automation that could be added to Otto Bot Bot. For example, tweet a classic Otto quip at certain intervals much like his on air reads, or respond more intelligently to other twitter users.

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