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Text Messaging
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Web Application
Inspiration
We thought today's fast paced consumer culture had no time for the traditional way that people intake their news. Consumers don't really want to read large blocks of text and so we wanted to build a platform where consumers can still intake their news through images.
What it does
A user nudges the bot with a text message that can be anything. The bot responds back with a list of concepts which is compiled by the Top Stories on the New York Times. If the user is interested in any of the concepts, they can open up the browser to where the flask app is hosted to see a list of images from the New York Times from their Top Stories.
How we built it
We grabbed all the articles using the NYT Top Stories API. We searched through the response for the links to where the images for each article was hosted. We sent Clarifai the pictures from the NYT and used the concept response data and plugged it into Twilio. We used Twilio's SMS messaging service to send the concepts, formatted nicely in a sentence to the individual that is interested about the top stories of today. All this was done in python and built with flask.
Challenges we ran into
We had some issues working with Twilio's python client because the modules were not loaded in correctly. We had some issues with our app routes in our flask app so our twilio client wasn't posting messages back to our phones correctly.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
For the 2 out of the 3 of us, it is our first Hackathon! We are proud of what we did because we worked with API's and a programming language that isn't Java outside of the classroom setting.
What we learned
How to send and get responses from a Rest API. How does Clarifai's image training model work. How does Twilio work hand in hand with our flask server. How to manipulate large lists, arrays and json data so that we can get what we need to use.
What's next for NotifaiMe News
Build a better Clarifai image recognition model so that we can get the concepts for the faces of important people. Currently, we use Clarifai to predict our images using it's general model and you can
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