Bot army

CyberPrefixer

Source

CyberPrefixer scrapes news headlines from the Google News RSS feed, and attempts to find headlines that are complete, short enough to use in a tweet, and relatively inoffensive. It then uses topia.termextract to tag the parts-of-speech in the headline, and prefixes any nouns with "cyber". Although the idea came from Darius Kazemi's Cyberpunk Fiction Machine, I found it created some wonderful, if not alarming, headlines.

SubstitutionBot

Source

SubstitutionBot was suggested to me by Jonathan Goodwin, who messaged me to say "Please make a twitter bot for xkcd #1288 I would be so happy." I suggested that maybe it should be combined with xkcd #1322, and set to work.

1288: "Substitutions"

1322: "Winter"

SubstitutionBot reuses much of the same code as CyberPrefixer. It has the same morbid regular expression, and performs the same checks on the length and format of the headline itself. However, because SubstitutionBot needs a larger volume of headlines than CyberPrefixer (because relatively few headlines contain words that will be substituted), I use The Guardian's API to retrieve headlines. Once a suitable headline is found, appropriate words are substituted using a simple dictionary lookup.

misheardly

Source

misheardly uses the last.fm API to find popular songs, then scrapes the lyrics from a lyrics website. It attempts to find the chorus of the song by finding the most frequently-repeated block of lyrics, then takes a snippet of those that's short enough to tweet. Using the RhymeBrain API, it finds the least frequently-used word in the snippet (to avoid rhyming words like "the"). It then hits the RhymeBrain API again to find a rhyming word that's not terribly unusual and that has a similar number of syllables, and replaces the original word with the rhyme.

you're valued

Source

you're valued searches Twitter for sad tweets, such as tweets saying "nobody likes me". It then responds to the user by replying to the tweet with a response like "You're valued." It avoids retweets and replies to other tweets, and attempts to avoid responding to tweets that contain song lyrics.

BostonSnowbot

Source

BostonSnowbot uses the Forecast.io API to find predicted snowfall in Boston, MA, then tweet when the predictions change.

Copyright © Molly White 2013–2016