Bob the Python Virtual Assistant
Text-based virtual assistant written in Python that utilizes various APIs (i.e. Google Calendar, YouTube) to help with simple everyday tasks. It can also do cute things like tell you jokes and quotes
Created on 16th November 2020
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Bob the Python Virtual Assistant
Text-based virtual assistant written in Python that utilizes various APIs (i.e. Google Calendar, YouTube) to help with simple everyday tasks. It can also do cute things like tell you jokes and quotes
The problem Bob the Python Virtual Assistant solves
Modern day loneliness... :((
During quarantine I've been spending less time on my phone and more time on my laptop because of school. I've become super reliant on Google Calendar and thought of how cool it would be to create a voice assistant that could work with Google Calendar. Rather than opening Google Calendar and making events manually, I wanted a quick and easy way to multitask: what if I could work on homework or watch YouTube videos while creating calendar events handfree? And thus, Bob the Python Virtual Assistant was born.
I know most PCs have Cortona, Macs have Siri, and most households have Alexa, but I wanted to create a voice assistant that can be hand tuned to my liking. Anyone can just download the code I've written so far and change it to their own liking so that they could make their own personalized assistant. With a custom written voice assistant, the only limitations are your imagination!
Some of the features so far:
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Feeling lonely? Have Bob tell you a joke!
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Need some inspiration? Bob can give you an inspiring quote!
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Want to see what's up with COVID? Bob can give you an update!!
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Want to add events to your calendar? Bob can do it!
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Want to see what upcoming events are coming up? Bob can do it too!
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Want to see the weather? Bob can tell you what's up!!
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ALL the features are listed on the GitHub page for this project
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I didn't have enough time in the demo to show all the features Bob can do >.< *
Challenges I ran into
Coming into this hackathon, I've never really written any programs that used more than 1 file or built in modules. I had never used APIs before and had to spend a bunch of time during the hackathon to learn how to use the requests module in Python and how to send queries to Google's API services. A major challenge I faced was figuring out how to work with the various time formats in my project. Google would give me time data in some weird looking format, and so did the datetime module in Python. Since I was working with so many different modules and API's I had to spend a lot of my time either reading documentation or searching up YouTube videos to help me.
Another challenge that I faced was the fact that I couldn't utilize the text to speech functions from Google's API. It worked, but it worked super slow. Originally, I wanted to create an assistant that could talk to you just like Siri and Alexa did. Unfortunately, my laptop was kinda slow so I decided to just make my assistant entirely text-based. It works much faster, and maybe down the road I can figure out a different approach to this problem and hopefully solve it.