
Show HN: A tool to make a bot that speaks like you, learning from WhatsApp chats - spandan-madan
https://github.com/Spandan-Madan/Me_Bot
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spandan-madan
To everyone - I literally came back home from lab to find this blown up.
Little overwhelming frankly.

I built the bot as a gift for a friend, and didn't really see the Black Mirror
angle, even though I have seen the series.

Anyway, if someone is interested in building extensions of this, please write
to me at smadan@mit.edu, I'd be happy to collaborate and guide :)

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fractallyte
Better be careful with that...

From "Bicycle Repairman", by Bruce Sterling (1996) (This is a spoiler, BTW!):

"The mook speaks just like the Senator did, or the way the Senator used to
speak, when he was in private and off the record. The way he spoke in his
diaries. As far as we can tell, the mook was his diary.... It used to be his
personal laptop computer. But he just kept transferring the files, and
upgrading the software, and teaching it new tricks like voice recognition and
speech-writing, and giving it power of attorney and such.... And then, one day
the mook made a break for it. We think that the mook sincerely believes that
it’s the Senator."

Oh, and just note that this was _way_ before Black Mirror.

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vermilingua
I mean, off topic, but it's not like any (citation needed) of the ideas in
Black Mirror are original; it repackages existing ideas and tropes in a modern
context. It does an excellent job of that, but it's a bit disingenuous to use
it as the golden standard for whacky scifi prophecies.

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avgDev
It would be nice to create a bot that would learn how I write my shitty code
to be able to write code for me when I retire and eventually die. Only to be
resurrected in JavaScript.

:')

~~~
palashkulsh
that could be made recursive ;)

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TheLudd
Sounds interesting. I'll report on my results here once I have uploaded my
otherwise end to end encrypted private and personal conversations into this
unknown script...

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alexis_fr
It gets better. Soon it will imitate you without you uploading your
conversations, because enough people around you did it (making themselves
guilty of private conversation disclosure, at least 6 months emprisonment in
France).

It’s not that privacy is an endless pursuit, it’s more that the governments
enjoy it so much that they don’t really work on preventing it.

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throwawaylolx
Pretty crazy. It's not synthesizing new sentences, but it's basically a huge
index of yourself. You can ask it "what's your favorite food?" and you get a
response back.

This makes private conversations that much more valuable to ad companies: if
WhatsApp sells all your conversation packaged into a model similar to this,
most of your personality is easily summarised to be targeted.

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aminmemon
This is very interesting.

I had been lurking with an idea where one could create a bot, which is a clone
of yourself. Bot learns/trains by hearing what you say and how you say. When
you talk with the bot, it replies back with your own voice, basically Siri
with your own voice and attitude. It would be the best thing one could leave
behind after his death.

Is it possible to pull off something like this?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
This is literally a Black Mirror episode -

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back)

Synopsis: "The episode tells the story of Martha (Hayley Atwell), a young
woman whose boyfriend Ash Starmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car
accident. As she mourns him, she discovers that technology now allows her to
communicate with an artificial intelligence imitating Ash, and reluctantly
decides to try it. "Be Right Back" had two sources of inspiration: the
question of whether to delete a dead friend's phone number from one's
contacts, and the idea that Twitter posts could be made by software mimicking
dead people."

~~~
knolax
I understand the value of providing hypothetical situations, but the constant
mention of Black Mirror episodes with very little other substance here is
getting tiring. Without having seen Black Mirror, that synopsis doesn't add
much to the conversation other than "somebody made a tvshow/movie about that".
Other than the fact that a similar situation was explored, what new conclusion
did the episode reach that warrants mentioning?

~~~
NetOpWibby
Mainly that it was creepy and the widower realized she didn’t really want a
dead boyfriend/android thing.

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matte_black
I wonder if one could create clones of every user on a site such as hackernews
for instance, and create bots for each one, such that when you feed in a
random article, comments are automatically generated and replies to comments
appear recursively. Comments as a Service.

Poor bastard who stumbles into such a forum never realizing everyone is a bot.

~~~
spandan-madan
I think people have done something similar with reddit actually. They tried to
make redit conversations, and well as expected they were pretty funny. Try
google searching ou might be able to find it.

~~~
otalp
[https://reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator](https://reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator)

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josteink
Why not learn from normal text-files instead?

Why connect it to a facebook-owned, proprietary service?

~~~
dcwca
If you follow the instructions you’ll discover that it works by reading normal
text files.

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DINKDINK
A more interesting tool: a tool to stylometry-fuzz one's writing.

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jdalgetty
I'm getting this error when I try to run it:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "clean_whatsapp_chats.py", line 39, in
<module> all_text[-1] += line IndexError: list index out of range

~~~
throwawaylolx
You're supposed to change the name globals as mentioned in the README.md file.

Then you also need to create a `res` directory in the root directory and
install the necessary dependencies. Then you also need to change the encoding
when you load the serialized data in the preprocessing notebook.

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franl
If you’re looking for a quick, fun sci fi read with this concept run amok
check out Darknet by Matthew Mather.

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iamrobschiavone
Be Right Back

~~~
fredley
This comment is referencing _Be Right Back_ , a Black Mirror episode featuring
this exact idea as a premise.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back)

~~~
iagooar
One of the best episodes of Black Mirror. Truly made me have deep thoughts
about myself, life, and where humanity is going. Immortality seems indeed
achievable, but not in a biological way our ancestors imagined.

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tschellenbach
black mirror anyone?

