DEV Community: theapache64

How we developed a chatbot to fight against COVID-19?

theapache64 — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 14:18:37 +0000

I remember the night when a nationwide lockdown was declared. We were all sitting around bored, thinking, "Something has to be done with the excessive amount of data flowing around in GitHub." People were creating numerous APIs, web sites and mobile apps to provide information about the disease.

🤕 Problem

People had so many questions, but the answers are usually very scattered (different websites and apps). Finding out the right information is hard and it takes a lot of time. To judge the reliability of that information is important as well.

💡 Solution

We concluded that we needed something which was:

🤗 Trustworthy
⚡ Quickly accessible
🗣️ Interactive

⌨️ Implementation

We finally decided to make something that combined the three factors stated above. A Chatbot was the answer.

We started looking for the data sources which provide maximum accuracy and reliability. We found CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 a data repository operated by Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE). It as the most accurate data on the internet. Also, it's the primary source of all other APIs available out there. We also found some supercool APIs, so we integrated all of them into one.

🌟 Features

Fast forward 4-5 days, we've created a Telegram chatbot, named @CoDoc19Bot, with the following features:

1) 🤖 QA
You can ask your questions right away. With the support of NLP (Natural Language Processing), it will answer all your questions.

2) 🥼 Corona Test
To check the likelihood of having COVID-19.

3) 🤔 Quiz
Are you taking the correct protective measures against COVID-19? Find out.

4) 📈 Statistics
To get global COVID-19 statistics with charts.

📣 Publishing

On April 5th, we released the first version through ProductHunt. People started to use it. After 6 hours, we had around ~600 active users with ~3000 requests processed.

💣 What went wrong?

1) After the release, one of the external APIs changed their API structure without any notice 😓. Luckily, we came to know the error and fixed it in a couple of minutes.

2) We couldn't test it with all the countries. So, in the CSSEGISandData dataset, South Korea was labeled as Korea, South and we've been using simple string explode function to parse the CSV 🙄, as a result 🤷, it broke. We timely fixed it with a good CSV parsing algorithm. 😀

👆 What we learned?

Do not deploy anything without thorough testing 😋
If you're using any external API, try to monitor it using a program.

⛓️ Links

Install the bot using @CoDoc19Bot handler
Learn more about it from our website
Learn how it works and contribute!

teamxenox / CoDoc19

CoDoc19 is a telegram bot which helps to let you know more about COVID-19.

CoDoc19 🤖

CoDoc19 is a telegram bot which helps to let you know more about COVID-19.

Install ⚙️

The telegram handler is @CoDoc19Bot. So just go to telegram app and start interacting with it 👨‍💻

Features / Commands

To start interacting with the bot 🔰

/start

After entering this command you will get the available commands

Corona Test 🌡

To check the likelihood of having COVID 19 📋

/test

With this test you can quickly check the likelihood of having Covid-19. This test is regularly updated and based on the recommendations of certified health organizations. It is purely intended to provide guidance and is not an official diagnosis.

QA 👨‍⚕️

Provide trustworthy answers to questions about COVID-19 via NLP

People have many questions about COVID-19, answers are scattered on different websites finding the right answers takes a lot of time and trustworthiness of answers is hard to judge. So…

View on GitHub

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AutoMotion: How I Automated My Video Editing Process

theapache64 — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 11:43:50 +0000

Hey DEV community! This is my first post, and I'm thrilled to share this with you!

The Dream

While streaming YouTube videos, I would often dream about becoming a YouTuber, as I'm sure many of us do. I feel like I have a wealth of knowledge I'd like to share with the world. Small tutorial videos, talking about how I develop my hobby projects, and providing developers some productivity tips. Just something, anything, even if on a small scale. But to do these things, 🙄 I'd have to:

Learn the fundamentals of video editing and how to use various editing software 📔
Spend a good portion of time editing my video projects 👨‍💻
Do the usual, and often repetitive, drop-crop-trim process ✂️
Switch from Ubuntu, my primary OS that I love, as most of the professional video editing software works only on Windows/MacOS 😥
Spend a lot of time waiting for the final output to render ⏳
And many other reasons to push me away from my dream 🙄

I know, I know. All these things make me sound like a really lazy person. That's because I AM! 😁 So what do I do?

Moment of Inspiration 🌩️

"I know some dumb programming. Would I be able to automate this process?" I asked myself, and that was it. What did I have to lose? So I decided to try and automate this process.

Research 🔍

I've heard that ffmpeg is a good tool to process video frames. So I quickly browsed through the docs, and found that it's pretty straightforward even for a simpleton like me.

Core Feature 🤖

If the input video is a 10 minutes footage, and if it has 1 minute of non-talking area (the area where no one is talking) after every 2 minutes,

I want to timelapse those areas to 15 seconds of footage. So the total video length becomes 7 minutes and 45 seconds.

Also, while running the timelapse, I want to replace the footage's raw audio with some cool BGM 🥁.

So this was the core feature I wanted to implement in the thing, for which I had not decided a name at that point.

Initial Development ⚗️

I created a shell script to process a sample video I downloaded from YouTube. I wrote some basic stuff in it, like

Adding intro
Adding text to intro
Trimming video parts
Timelapse video parts
Adding background music
Adding watermark
Adding end credits

It took me 3 days to write it all by hand. I just wanted to check if ffmpeg has the potential to do what I want it to, and it really impressed me, going beyond my expectations.

Next thing I wanted to do was generate these ffmpeg commands dynamically. 💣

Code Improvements ⌨️

It took me around 5 days to code the entire program. Then I proceeded to make some code improvements and made all possible input variables dynamic, which means you can control pretty much anything in it: Timelapse speed, intro title, watermark title, minimum timelapse duration, you name it.

Here's the overview of the core stack:

Language : Kotlin 🧠
Video Processing : ffmpeg 🎞
Audio Processing : autosub 🎧
Command Line Parsing : commons-cli

At this stage, I also settled on a name for this project, auto-motion.

Now, let's run it! 🏃

Input 🕹

Input is a 6 minutes video from comma archive, captured by George Hotz in a recent hackathon they conducted.

Execution 🖱️

It only took ~1 minute to edit and render the output, whereas a manual edit would have taken hours, perhaps even days, to accomplish it. 🤷

Output 📺

The output, reduced to 4 minutes 43 seconds, is here. It includes 7 time-lapses of different lengths.

I know the output is not as enjoyable as a manually edited one, but I believe I can improve this in due time 😇. You'll see more dynamic and interesting output in the near future on my Youtube channel. If you like my work, please subscribe to be notified. 🤗

Download 📩

You can view the source code as well as download the program from GitHub.

teamxenox / auto-motion

A tool to edit your lengthy screen records, automatically.

auto-motion (legacy)

A CLI program to edit your videos, instantly, with minimum input.

Dependencies 💢

java
ffmpeg (>=4.2.2)
python

Install 🛠

wget "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/theapache64/auto-motion/master/install.sh" -q --show-progress -O install.sh && sh install.sh && source ~/.bashrc

Usage 🖥

usage: auto-motion -v input.mp4 [-H] -V <arg> [-BGM <arg>] [-ST <arg>]
       [-VL <arg>] [-MTL <arg>] [-TLS <arg>] [-ID <arg>] [-CR <arg>] [-WM
       <arg>] [-IT <arg>] [-CT <arg>] [-IST <arg>] [-CST <arg>] [-F <arg>]
       [-HL <arg>] [-WMC <arg>] [-WMS <arg>] [-WMBG <arg>] [-WMBGO <arg>]
       [-TFS <arg>] [-STFS <arg>] [-TC <arg>] [-STC <arg>] [-BG <arg>]
       [-RSRT <arg>] [-DSRT] [-RFMPG] [-sf] [-KS]
A tool to edit your lengthy screen records, automatically. Version
v1.0.0-alpha01
 -H,--help                              To print help text
 -V,--video <arg>                       Video inputs (required at least
                                        one)
 -BGM,--background-music <arg>          Background music for timelapse.
                                        Default
                                        '/home/theapache64/Documents/proje
                                        cts/auto-motion/lab/lost_in_time.m
                                        p3'
 -ST,--sub-title <arg>                  Intro sub title
 -VL,--video-lang <arg>                 Video language. Default 'en'
 -MTL,--min-tl-src-len <arg>            Minimum timelapse source length
                                        (in

…

View on GitHub

If you have some videos, download the code and run it on them to check out the output for fun. 🤪

Thanks for reading!

I'm really happy I wrote this and I'm excited to share more with you all. If you liked the post, do share it with your friends. Feel free to post your suggestions for future posts! Thank you for reading this. Ciao!

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We are currently working on Caligator, one of the products we built last year which got great reception from you all and the good folks over at ProductHunt.

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