President Obama has said a lot of words. That is a fact. I wanted to use those words and make a Robot to talk in his voice… on Twitter. So I built a Markov text generator using some of his speeches available at American Rhetoric.

I built a simple system using 3-grams, and treating punctuation as words. I knew I was on to something when the program spit this out:

It’s not a nice-to-have – it’s a tragedy – underscores the urgent need for good-paying jobs in the United States. Instead of funding the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the chance to make sure that what sets us apart must not just some; words that insist we rise or fall as one nation by their side. And it includes the largest commitments to one of the inspiring military spouses. And as a citizen – inspired by those who serve our society that perhaps violence is a powerful advantage in global competition. Just a few things in life and to future generations to know the feeling of not being in control of your life matters, and we expect new spacecraft as part of our communities,

So I decided to build a twitter bot based on my Markov generator. You can find President Robama at @brobama. Right now, it’s a simple script that I have to call myself from the terminal. I’m going to automate several parts, including replying to tweets, and I’ll post the details here some time in the future.

Outline

President Robama consists of 3 parts:

1. monitor/scraper of AmericanRhetoric.com
2. Markov text generator
3. Twitter integration