textdit

Sample Conversation with Textdit (1 of 3)
Sample Conversation with Textdit (2 of 3)
Sample Conversation with Textdit (3 of 3)

Text +17606426437 to see Textdit in action!

Inspiration

It's the end of the month, you've run out of data, and you find yourself constantly refreshing the web only to realize that you won't be able to find that cute dog photo you were searching for. Fear not! Textdit to the rescue!

What it does

Textdit delivers all of the wonderful distractions of the internet that reddit can supply as SMS and MMS messages, avoiding pesky data overage charges and providing a convenient access point for your favorite news/article headlines, memes, and images directly to your phone.

How we built it

Textdit leverages the Twilio, reddit, and Google's Cloud Vision API's to deliver subreddit specific content and comments. The messages are intelligently parsed for keywords, which will automatically deliver content from subreddits. For example, if you ask to see a dog or cat, Textdit will use a python reddit praw wrapper API to fetch an image from "r/aww" and use Google Cloud Vision to detect if the image is of the animal you requested. The requested content is then returned to the user's phone via Twilio's API.

Applications

Reddit may not be the most practical application for this algorithm but more practical applications can involve sending google maps directions when stranded with no connection or sifting through google search images/websites for information. We used reddit since the API is very friendly and it was a fun project for a hackathon!

Future Improvements

Group text functionality
Using natural language processing to process comments to see how people feel about a certain articles
Fetching multiple posts and more comments
Using this algorithm for other sites, not just reddit