My own private BotArmy !
So, after all this news about Russian Bots, I decided to build my
own, private Bot Army.
The flagship bot was Friday, an intelligent, Siri-like Telegram Bot. I
ran into many problems, chiefly, the lack of time. Also, natural language processing is tough. I
don't get much time
for software development as I'm preparing for JEE. So yeah, Friday is
in development hell.
Edit (April 2018) : Creating this sort of stuff without machine
learning is nearly impossible. So I reused Friday Code to make an IRC
bot style digital assistant that responds to fixed commands. It uses
lots of APIs though, which have limited requests So, it is only used by
me and a couple of people I know on Telegram. I plan to release its
source when it is more mature.
Then, one one random night, I built @ShipOfMemes
- a twitter bot which posts the dankest memes from the web. It works
completely without human intervention. Just need to switch on my RasPi
everyday. Its a python script which uses praw and tweepy to scrape
images from meme subreddits. MemeShip then posts the most upvoted #memes
to twitter, along with the titles.
Edit (April 2018) : Turns out I'm too lazy to switch it on every day.
I will migrate it to my VPS if I get time. This thing never gained any
traction anyway.
MarvelStudiosBot:
Reddit bot for /r/marvelstudios on reddit. This was made by the
permission of the mods after a user requested it. However, it was banned
by a new, angry mod after it became too spammy. In its 15 day run, it
got approximately 13,000 upvotes. Also entered the sub's pop culture.
Had regular stuff like auto correct and cool stuff like the
!RedditVibranium currency. Source
Code
Truecaller Telegram Bot:
A telegram bot that uses an unofficial API to identify phone numbers.
Truecaller finds contact details globally, given name or telephone
number. It has created this big database by violating user privacy and
copying their phonebook onto their database. Using this bot, you can get
contact details without giving up your own privacy. You don't need to
use their app at all.
I had two other bots, for that gave world news and technology news to their respective telegram channels. They
were shut down after operating for a couple of months, mostly because I discovered FreshRSS
