Blursed ReadIt

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

Inspiration

For most of our team members, it is the first time that we are using Twilio to build our project. It occurred to us that we can build something light, fun and occasionally comforting using Twilio by animating a virtual bot that can interact with lonely or sad individuals. However, instead of giving the bot classic but neither original nor comforting response messages, we'll let the bot send some images or memes to entertain the user.

What it does

Blursed ReadIt looks like a messaging chatbot accessible through a specific phone number provided by Twilio. Once the user sends a text message to the phone number, Blursed ReadIt will take the user's input and evaluate the user's intention and emotion. It will compare these parameters with our vast database of Reddit subreddit posts to get an image (hopefully) related to your message. (It may be completely random as well.)

How we built it

By using Flask and Praw, we were able to build API to access Twilio and Reddit, respectively. Twilio makes it possible to implement our app using SMS and MMS messages, while Reddit provides the largest random pic database we can possibly find. The natural language plug-ins, NLTK and TextBlob, help us avoid errors caused by the user mistyping. Ngrok helps us run our local host on external devices.