Inspiration
Everyone's heard of or has had a swear jar at some point in their lives. The concept's a classic. Say a bad word, you gotta put some money in the jar. As we grow older, these sorts of things go away, and your wallet remains intact (usually) when you curse. But we thought, "Why don't we bring that back?" And so PottyPot was born.
What it does
PottyPot listens in 5 second bursts for any curse words, which are predefined in the application. After sending off the voice clips to the cloud, if any words are detected, PottyPot immediately charges your bank account based on the curse words you say.
How we built it
PottyPot is written in Python 3, and uses the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API, as well as PyAudio and the Dwolla payment API. Curse words, as well as payment amounts, are predefined in the main.py file, and can be changed by the user.
Challenges we ran into
We did hit a bit of a wall with speech recognition using the SpeechRecognition Python library, which was easily solved by dropping said library entirely and relying on Google Cloud, with increased accuracy and faster response times.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're pretty proud that we were able to resurrect a classic staple of childhoods all over the world into a modern, relatively easy-to-use format.
What we learned
We learned a bit about Dwolla, learned how to properly record audio with Python, and were conveniently reminded that Python can do ANYTHING.
What's next for PottyPot
We intend to perhaps make PottyPot into a streaming plugin for Twitch streamers, so that every time they curse, the money goes to charity. Considering how often streamers curse, I personally believe it would work out great as a fundraising tool.
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