Inspiration
We were inspired to build this after hearing about PALS, the program CAPS holds on campus where they allow students to pet and interact with dogs in order to mitigate stress.
What it does
So we decided to make an app that emulates the experience of PALS whenever you'd like. It finds pictures of cute dogs and puppies for its user and gives them cute, comforting, canine-inspired messages based on these images. Also, users are able to "up-pup" to show that they particularly enjoyed certain images. Any user can see what are the currently top 5 most popular kinds of dog images people tend to "up-pup".
How I built it
The backend is done in python using the Flask framework. Images are gotten with the Python Reddit Api Wrapper, put through Clarifai in order to confirm they are pictures of dogs, and then to extract information about the dog for construction of the comforting messages. These qualities extracted with Clarifai about the images are what users are effectively "up-pupping" and seeing popularity of.
Challenges I ran into
This was our first time using Clarifai and Flask, both of which are pretty powerful tools. There were multiple times in which we either couldn't, for a while, figure out how to pass a variable between the server to the client, or just persist it in the former. Using Clarifai, it took a while to get it working on Python and parsing the API result, yet it was immensely rewarding and became the backbone of our application.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We believe we've really created an app that can make people happy and mollify their stress/anxiety/sadness. It's wonderful to have that feeling of affecting the world like that. It was also amazing using a technology like Clarifai and kinda scary seeing the kinds of accurate messages we could string together with it (as well as the inaccurate messages haha).
What I learned
We gained a rudimentary understanding of Flask and Clarifai and some language-specific things about Python.
What's next for Pupper Scouter
We'd like to personalize the experience further by adding user authentication, allowing users to save their favorite dog image/message combinations and come back to them later, maybe even sharing them?
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