The Trumpinator

Inspiration

A peer made Tay-Text, an app that allows people to communicate with Taylor Swift lyrics. This project seemed like another way to delight people using popular culture

What it does

The Trumpinator allows it's user to ask Donald Trump what he thinks about various political and social issues and speaks back to the user in Donald Trump sound bytes. It takes text string inputs from the website or mobile and searches them against things Donald Trump has said. If no match is found, the Trumpinator chooses a random quote to say.

How I built it

the project is written in javascript as a website hosted on Microsoft Azure and ported to iOS and Android. I used Youtube's automatic Speech to Text engine to generate a list of quotes from Donald Trump video. I converted the video to MP3 and embedded it into the website along with the timestamps and text. I then added a search algorithm that searches the quotes using user inputs and then cues the MP3 to play the sound clip.

Challenges I ran into

I knew almost nothing at the start, in fact my first day I really just spun my wheels. I had no idea what I was doing as I had never done any of this before. My first challenge was my whole team leaving. We wanted to pull any and all Youtube videos and search the text on the videos for matches, but we ran into authentication issues. After everyone left, I scaled back my project ambitions and went to mentors to ask for simple steps I could conduct. This got me started. Next I had significant problems using github. I couldn't push or pull repositories from the application or command line. OnceI was able to figure github out, things started to come into place. I found examples of things I wanted to do that I could copy and modify, web pages that explained things, and mentors who could help me figure out the hardest parts of the code.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud to have completed my first app and to have significantly increased my knowledge about HTML, Javascript, webpages, and the cloud.

What I learned

I learned how to build web pages, write scripts, build and use objects in object oriented programming, create cloud servers on AWS and Azure, and port apps

What's next for The Trumpinator

I hope to add a google search dropdown to the submit bar, cognitive search of texts to gather meaning, expand the quote library, and eventually conduct accurate and automatic video to speech on youtube videos and mp3s. This will allow this project to expand beyond amusement. Applications could include transcription, increased public awareness of issues in Congress, and faster analysis and cataloguing of video content

Built With

• android-studio
• css
• html5
• javascript
• manifoldjs
• xcode