team 0 - coronavoice

Inspiration

I wanted to create a concise, accessible way to instantly harvest and analyze COVID-19 data from the web. I thought it would be fun to combine the two amazing techniques of web scraping and speech recognition.

What it does

COMMANDS:

• "what can I ask you?" "what can you do?" for instructions
• "goodbye" to end the conversation
• ask which state has the most/least cases/deaths per 100k people/capita
• ask for each state's total cases/deaths per 100k people/capita
• any combination of each of the above asks (per 100k/capita is optional)

How I built it

• python language, Pycharm IDE
• regex, BeautifulSoup, requests, pyttsx3, and speech_recognition python libraries
• lots and lots of research and patience!

Challenges I ran into

• converting strings (disguised as numbers) into proper formats to feed into the functions
• it was a fun challenge for me to figure out how to process the html/css elements from The New York Times website without getting blocked by the paywall (selenium to the rescue!)

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• I gave the robot a "wake word" (like, "hey google" or "alexa")
• created a complicated structure to efficiently test for different input cases

What I learned

• webscraping with the beautiful soup and requests libraries
• text-to-speech and speech-to-text functions
• regex syntax and concepts

What's next for team 0 - coronavoice

If I had more time, I would love to create a graphical user interface version of this app, where you could press a button to wake up the robot. I would also add functionality to read aloud the latest COVID-19 news, in addition to more stats regarding different countries.

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• pycharm
• python
• pyttsx3
• regex
• requests
• speech-recognition