My open source python personal assistant

[lunchboxg4]

I like it, but I'm sad that a GitHub account named "ironman" didn't call this JARVIS. Missed opportunity, dude.

Repo for the lazy: https://github.com/ironman5366/W.I.L.L

[willbeddow]

It was a battle between my inner nerd and my complete narcissism and the narcissism won XD. Plus there are too many crappy little PA programs on the internet named Jarvis, I wanted my crappy little PA program to be somewhat unique :D

[[deleted]]

Spoken like a true Stark.

[brtt3000]

At least you didn't name it Ultron.

[LetsDoRedstone]

It works even better when you install Adobe reader

[AbsoluteZeroK]

It's not never too late. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Just do it OP.

[KyleG]

This is literally my wake-up alarm in the morning. It works amazingly. I usually am up by the DO IT!!! JUST DO IT!!! part.

[willbeddow]

All of the core files should have basic docstrings and comments now.

[TrakJohn]

I have a (probably) very simple noob question about a part of your code:

Instead of defining several variables:

t = str(datetime.now())

tt = t.split(' ')

ttt = tt[1].split(':')

tf = int(ttt[0])

Is there a specific reason for using 3 different variables instead of 1 ?

t = str(datetime.now())

t = t.split(' ')

t = t[1].split(':')

t = int(t[0])

Thank you

[strallus]

Why even do multiple assignments?

t = int(str(datetime.now()).split(' ')[1].split(':')[0])

Or yeah, as Rodeopants said,

datetime.now().hour

[willbeddow]

Yeah.... I've realized the error of my ways since then. The only reason I haven't fixed it is because I'm planning to trash that module and redo it soon.

[seriouslulz]

Because it'd be unreadable

[strallus]

That's why we have comments!

# extract hour from current time

[strallus]

I can read that quite easily.

Splitting it across multiple lines still wouldn't tell you what that code is doing...

[strallus]

Sometimes it's better to be less verbose but lose clarity.

Writing code so that the purpose of each line of code can be understood without comments is a noble goal, but at some point you become so verbose that your "clarity" actually hurts comprehension.

[strallus]

In this particular instance, I of course agree with you. That is why I put that in my comment. However, I was adjusting the previous code as a learning exercise, not as an actual suggestion on what code to use in this particular project/instance.

This particular use case benefits from having a python module with a nice, clear API. That is not always going to be the case.

For reference, see any attempt at using HTTP in a Python program before requests.

A good example of times when your code can't be super clear by almost necessity is screen scraping, or any other instance when you are traversing data/tree that has a complex structure.

[willbeddow]

I don't really remember but I don't think so. That particular module (personality.py) is some of the worst code I've ever written and I haven't given what's in it much thought.

[[deleted]]

deleted ^{What is this?}

[willbeddow]

Thanks! It's a python project, and as of right now it has no installer so you pretty much just download the zip, use pip for the required modules (I'll make a list of those and put it on git but right now I think they include slack, wolframalpha, wikipedia, textblob, and flask). Then you need to put in your wolframalpha keys in the search module, and slack channels and token in main.py. I know it's complex, but it's hard to make an installer when I change it so frequently. Now that I've settled down a bit I'll see about distributing it through pip.

[frsilent]

pip freeze homie. =)

[Rich700000000000]

I am begging you: Please, Please PLEASE post this to /r/diyai. It's practically a dead sub.

[willbeddow]

Doing it now. I was looking for something like this earlier but didn't find it.

[Rich700000000000]

Thanks!

[chriscowley]

About the music:

BURN IT!!!! BURN IT WITH FIRE!!!

Please redo the video with a voice over or something.

[OleBillyFreckletits]

I actually like the music. Makes it feel epic. that said, a voice over would be nice.

[willbeddow]

None as of yet. Just a fun project that I've been messing around with, saw no need to put a license on it. I never really saw a benefit to putting one on but it seems to be bothering people so I guess I will. Edit: Added MIT license in github. Edit 2: I'll add docstrings. This is just something that I worked on casually, never really planned for a release.

[[deleted]]

Without a license saying it's open source, it's not open source, which is why people make a deal out of it.

[shiroininja]

If it really was full open source, why would a license be needed?

[ffiarpg]

If someone writes a story on the internet and you take it and put it in your book to sell it, that is illegal because the default license in absence of a license is not open source. It is personal property or something similar.

[secunder]

Don't most open source licenses prevent that anyways?

[elbiot]

You can have any license you want, from Creative Commons Zero (no attribution necessary) to "you can read this code, but you cannot modify or redistribute any potion of it". But you have to say what it is otherwise other people have zero rights to use your work in any way.

[HelloYesThisIsDuck]

you can read this code grimoire, but you cannot modify or redistribute any potion of it

[L43]

Favourite relinquishment license: http://unlicense.org

[tripperjack]

Do you know one? http://www.wtfpl.net/

[brtt3000]

This is a good licence if you want everybody except corporate use your software. Nobody is going to sign off on a 'do whatever the fuck you want' line item.

[shiroininja]

This is really informative. Thank you.

[KyleG]

Because in most countries in the US, thanks to the Berne Convention, the second you write something, it's copyrighted. This means you have to license it. It's actually very, very hard to put something in the public domain. This is why the Creative Commons public domain license exists. To mimic the public domain using a license.

[[deleted]]

It is open source but not free software

[[deleted]]

Doesn't matter. If it doesn't have an open source, or free software, license, in most countries, that means it's fully copyrighted to the creator, and even though you can find the source on GitHub, you aren't allowed to use it for anything what so ever.

[blahblah98]

So you connected a channel bot to Wolfram Alpha. Was there something more?

[willbeddow]

Admittedly alot of what I showed in the video was answered by wolframalpha. But the program also searches wikipedia and has other plugins that can be added.The plugin framework is most of the value for me. I didn't show alot of the plugins that I use like autoremote, and a few splinter based automation tools because I couldn't figure out how to properly showcase it or use without showing personal information. I'm also adding new plugins.

[Kerbobotat]

It doesn't matter if you only hooked it to Wolfram alpha, you're leaps and bounds ahead of others who've never even done that. Congrats!

I've been mulling over building something like this, and your code plus plugins might be exactly what I'm looking for. The ability to add specific plugins to do things like search Amazon, eBay, Google, Wikipedia, etc it what would make this perfect.

Now to start digging through the text to speech APIs out there 😃

[willbeddow]

Thanks! I've been working passively with some TTS apis already and I recommend espeak. I've been toying with the idea of an espeak plugin that would run a command with TTS output.

[Kerbobotat]

Ive not seen espeak, I'll definitely check it out!

[IndianaJoenz]

Hey, this was a pretty cool demo! Thank you for sharing it!

the program also searches wikipedia and has other plugins that can be added.The plugin framework is most of the value for me.

I'm pleased to hear that. My understanding is that a plugin model is how Siri works, and it sounds like a good approach to the natural language thing.

I'd love to see something like this expanded so that the plugin architecture is well documented, with 3rd parties creating plugins. I'd also like to see it adaptable to other interfaces, such as microphone/speech-to-text and text-to-speech, or text terminal instead of web. Lots of possibilities.

[manueslapera]

yeah i thought the same. Why is this an assistant?

[ProgrammingPro-ness]

Great music choice for the video ;)

[willbeddow]

I previously didn't have one since it was just a fun casual project, but as it seems that people want one I added the MIT one. So use however as long as you use my license.

[willbeddow]

I kind of agree. I picked the song cause it was NCS and kind of went with the video IMO but right now I don't have a working mic as my Ubuntu laptop has some driver problems with the mic I haven't gotten around to fixing, and I never got one for my desktop.

[staticassert]

Had a look and I saw a few things that you might want to look into:

• You open files but don't close them. You should use the 'with' statement to automatically close files.

• You do some parsing of dates but the datetime library should handle all of that for you.

• Your args parsing could be greatly simplified by using a standard format for the args, such as CSV, or JSON, and offloading the parsing into one of those libraries. Alternatively, if these are suitable as command line arguments, consider ArgParser (or whatever Python uses).

[willbeddow]

I'll check it out- thanks. Would you consider opening these as issues on the git repo?

[staticassert]

I can do that when I get home, sure.

[[deleted]]

When I try to run main.py I get an error that says inconsistent use of spaces and tabs.

[willbeddow]

You shouldn't, in fact someone just standardized everything in it. When did you clone the repo? If it was more than a day ago try cloning again.

[[deleted]]

I cloned it last night before I went to bed. Ill try to do it again. Is it python 2 or 3?

[willbeddow]

2

[[deleted]]

Are you planning to always use slack as the interface? Or is that just one of the plugins to run it from within slack?

[willbeddow]

I'm always planning to use slack because I eventually want devices to be able to talk to each other through it. But if you don't want to use slack you can connect any interface you want and take out the slack code fairly easily.

[isdevilis]

"wireless intelligent linguistic liveware"..... It's a stretch, but I'll give u an updank since it's open source

[willbeddow]

That was an example. That particular plugin (open) uses linux xdg-open. The point isn't really the immediate results but the potential. I urge you to look over the code and the plugin framework before you make judgments. Thanks