Talking Moose

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Sept 25, 2018, GeoDataSource has lat, long, city, country.
July 24, 2017. This Discord offers chat as a service, and maybe that’s a good thing to integrate into the Moose.
July 23, 2017. A list of chatbot companies.
June 9, 2017 Following up the idea to use my phone as a microphone, to talk to the Moose, I learned about Joaoapps.com, their software Join and AutoTools for Tasker. Perhaps AutoVoice. The idea is to get AutoTools -> Tasker to do Speech-to-Text, then create JSON and send it via Webhooks to Moose’s cloud, which sends it to your Moose on your PC, routed to the API.ai plugin, where the Moose will get a conversational answer back from API.ai, and speak to you.
June 3, 2017. Bonsai will make Artificial Intelligence or machine learning easier to use.
May 9, 2017. Recime.io is an AWS service that lets 1 chatbot be accessed through multiple portals, facebook, slack, and so on.
May 6, 2017. Split.io is for controlling which users can access certain features. Polynect is for combining users into small groups, possibly for social interactions.
April 15, 2017. Arcgis API for geospatial mapping. (dots on map at lat, long).
February 4,2017. OpenStack API is full of new vocabulary that confuses me, and probably just does what AWS does. Someone should explain it to me better. Simility has a fraud detection API. Identityserver.io handles authenticating user identities, probably much better than struggling to combine Facebook and AWS.

December 13, 2016Recast.ai is a free collaborative bot platform with API, for conversational bots.

October 24, 2016. This great article about Startup CEO qualities, I didn’t want to lose. My glaring faults are these (plus others): (1) I don’t fire people fast. (2) I didn’t give up my radiology career to work exclusively on the Moose project. I may be slow and too-patient, but at least the project is slowly getting done.

Sept 27, 2016.

  • Google translation, is getting good. GNMT, Google Neural Machine Translation. Could be helpful for multi-language moose.
  • A geofencing service at fencer.io looks very useful.

Sept 1, 2016.

  • This Laminar API provides weather from airports, which can be better than ordinary sources.

August 26,2016. This caught my attention. The Convertio.co API is paid, but it converts a lot of different things. The idea of grabbing screen captures, sending them to other APIs to see if images are recognized ( like looking at kittens, or sexuality ), or doing OCR on whatever webpage is being viewed. Then the Moose could “comment” on it. People would hate that, so it would have to be something they CHOOSE to turn on for their own amusement. It just seems kind of “god-like” for the Moose to say, “Enjoying kittens, me too. and reading about clickbait headlines, I hate those too.”

August 10, 2016. A nice article at NordicAPIs.com on some ChatOps tools websites..

August 1, 2016.

  • This datafire.io might be useful for “data flows” on a schedule, for APIs of news services. This service needs a little maturing.
  • AvatarAPI.com returns the user’s name and picture, from Google, using the email address.
  • The Skygear.io API does chat, push (pub/sub), user management, links to facebook, geoIP, bots, storage.
  • Record every click with Fullstory.com
  • A too-expensive API SmartMedical Empath for analyzing emotions heard on microphone.
  • A food calories API FatSecret Platform which might be handy for my hall.md website.

July 24, 2016.

  • seems like apigility.org is a free system that I could put on one of my virtual private servers (I have 2, both with spare capacity), and it gives a nice user interface that would let me create API’s and put PHP code in them to create the content. That’s nice. I use a lot of PHP anyway.
  • An API for getting a free rotating proxy server at Proxicity for 12 requests per minute. Neat.
  • Brainshop.ai has a chatbot “aco”
  • Withings.com sells weigh scales, wristbands like fitbit; which are wifi connected and send data to an API. The Moose could contribute to commentary about weigh-ins and amounts of exercise done. And a nice affiliate program.

July 15, 2016. The search for APIs continues.

  • AngelHack can organize Hackathons on a topic like extending the Moose.
  • Cloudinary.com has an API that can resize videos (like Moose speaking videos) to small size and deliver them to smartphones in a video format that works on that phone.
  • UsedDopamine.com has an API that will take care of randomized positive reinforcements.
  • Angus.ai looks useful. Hook up a video source, or an audio, and it will return information about whose faces it recognizes, are they talking, are they happy, who is looking where, etc.
  • Wit.ai Seems to be a free Speech to Text service.
  • Scriptr.io Looks like javascript for multi-step Zaps, and currently free. Wow.
  • Myle is a wearable microphone, one-touch, speak a command that does a personal-assistant kind of task.

July 14,2016. More APIs.

I’ve started looking through the database of APIs available on programmableweb.com

Also, see Proximity beacons like Estimote.com, which might help solve the problem of using the Moose for notifications. GPS probably isn’t accurate enough, so if you put a beacon on your PC, and your smartphone is near the PC, then it could tell the Moose on that PC, that you seem to be nearby-enough, to speak Notifications, instead of sending them to your phone. Google has a specification for Google Beacons.

A big red button: bt.tn could send a message to the Moose to speak something for weight loss or for anxiety.

Pushover

June 6, 2016 update. The Moose got a new feature: Pushover abilities. The Moose can act as a Pushover Desktop Client. What is this good? Here’ some examples.
But first, I got registered on IFTTT.com, and on Pushover.com. IFTTT.com was free. My Pushover.com account cost $4.95 – a one time fee, for the “Desktop browser notification support”.

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Then I ran the Moose, and it’s plugin for Pushover, and it registered itself with Pushover successfully, using my UserName and Password. After that, the Moose is ready and waiting to receive notifications. It speaks them.

Then I went to IFTTT.com, and searched for recipies that use pushover. I found this one. If it’s going to rain tomorrow, it sends a notification to my home PC and the Moose will speak it.

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Then, I used my Android phone, and went to the Google Play store, and downloaded and installed the IF app. I returned to IFTTT.com and started using the “Android Location Channel”.

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Finally, I made a new recipe in IFTTT.com, When my cellphone location is entering my home geofence area, it sends a message “Welcome Home” to Pushover, which sends it to my home PC, and the Moose will speak “Welcome home”.

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I think that’s pretty neat.

(older content on this topic… )

Mar 26, 2016. I’ve been researching services like IFTTT, and PushBullet, and finding some alternatives, and I’ve been thinking about how their advantages, and the Moose’s advantages, could work together.

Two Kinds of things I want:
1. Events outside my computer, like sensors in the real world, or new Information on the internet, of interest.

2. Events I generate on my own computer, from webpages running on Chrome, where I push a button and Javascript is supposed to make make the Moose say something. ( For these, I’d prefer if the message could stay on my “localhost” and not go bouncing around the internet. )

Here are my thoughts at the moment.

IFTTT.com, It is succeeding in getting the manufacturers of sensor hardware, to sign up. So a lot of home automation, security, and control gadgets, the Internet Of Things stuff with WIFI, are prominent on IFTTT.

But when I looked around on IFTTT, I cant’ find anything that interests me. their page about “Maker Channel” has no useful information. Sheesh. OH, I had to register, then it lets me find a little documentation. But I still can’t find documentation to make a C# application into a client that receives push events.

So they POST with https to trigger an event.

In the future, I’d enjoy little gadgets like:
– Someone entered a particular space, go watch them on the video feed.
– Someone’s walking down the hallway towards you. Quick.. stop playing games.

But I did find that IFTTT has channels for PushBullet and PushOver. (see below). So I could give the Moose the ability receive messages with their APIs instead.

PushBullet.com They have a much longer API with many abilities. Uses https and websocket.
https://docs.pushbullet.com/

PushOver.net this looks good. Particularly the instructions to create a client.
https://pushover.net/api/client
The Moose could use a Plugin, that creates this ability. Needs WebSocket capability.

Alternatives:
airdroid.com, it mostly seems to be for “mirroring” your phone notifications, onto your PC.

Tasker for Android, sadly only on Android.

Pushwoosh.com can work with Zapier.

Zapier.com Is superior to IFTTT, because it can chain multiple steps, and has double the number of usable channels. It can run custom Javascript code and send an HTTP to the moose.
Here’s The Zapier developer documentation.

Why is the Moose speaking, more advantageous than a notification on a phone?

Simple: Hearing something, is effortless and hands-free.

Disadvantage? If you aren’t close to your computer, you miss hearing it. So Moose notifications will need to have back-up methods, and probably should hold delivery of spoken notifications until it knows the users is in hearing range.

Related Notes:

– Apache Thrift is apparently good at cross- language code generation, to give you code ready for use in APIs.
– ProgrammableWeb has API University – articles about building APIs.
– WIP Factory could help us, once our API is working, as we buff-up it’s documentation, as we want some developers out there, to test it and give the Moose useful things to speak about that we haven’t thought of ourselves.

– Found example code for WebSockets, which looks decently useful to let my local webbrowser send messages to my local moose, on localhost, not across the internet. ( I hope). Mentions SignalR as a library to make it easy. OR< I found websocket-sharp which looks newer.

April 3, 2016 update. Found Superfeedr and PubSubHubbub. I remembered Yahoo Pipes and found a page listing alternatives, and Huginn could run on a users PC, or on a VPS I provide. Heroku seems good, for maybe helping turn the Moose into an App for mobile, but it looks like it would cost a fortune in monthly fees. Here’s a different list of Yahoo pipes alternatives.

I also learned about buffer.com for scheduling things to post to social media, and getpocket.com for making offline copies of webpages, so you can read them later.

April 8, 2016 updateFrom this I learned that Amazon has SNS for push notifications to iOS, Android and Windows.

April 26, 2016. Learned of PubNub. Which might be a nice way to let all Moose users notify a central server that they are using the Moose.

May 26, 2016. I learned of kitt.ai and Snowboy and Chatflow.