Your Irreverent Friend Biff

Inspiration

As COVID restrictions continue and quarantine becomes common place, people are struggling to have human interaction. The solution? Biff, a friend that will allow you to vent and provide humor in its stupidity.

What it does

This program will hold a short conversation by prompting you to talk and listening to what you have to say... sort of. Just like that one friend who is only sort of paying attention and never really says the right thing at the right time.

How I built it

Through the spyder IDE, I used a speech recognizer library in python to recognize what the user was saying and then used a text to speech library to have the computer talk back to the user.

Challenges I ran into

The intent was to eventually include sentiment analysis so that the responses would be more fitting, but with no prior knowledge of how speech recognition and how sentiment analysis works and with limited time there was only so much I could teach myself and still end up with a working product. So I altered the plan and finished with working code of a not very smart friend.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am really proud that I was able to do what I did, I have only competed in one hackathon prior to this and I have grown as a programmer since, I was able to write all of the code on my own this time, something I have never done.

What I learned

I had never really though about speech recognition before this weekend. Learning what it was, how to use, and then incorporating it into my project was a rewarding experience.