The one where you are one of them

Overview

The idea for this project was to create a chat application where you have your words twisted by a famous TV show character. It would be fun to lose control of how your words get delived to people. Have your words twisted and take the group conversation in a completely unanticipated direction.

I started off with basing the chats on a more "friends" show style conversation. Because ofcourse 10 seasons weren't enough. I scraped the friends transcripts from here using cheerio. And trained a new model on RunwayML on those transcripts.

Going futher, I do plan to replicate the same experience with other shows too. Where the users can choose which kind of conversation they would like to be a part of.

      Try out the chat  here 

- Set a topic for the chat and invite your friends by sharing the link

It works something like this.

  Eg: I gave it a prompt of Joey saying "I am not feeling well today."

Once I hosted the model, I could communicate with it via it's REST API.

How it works

• The person initiating the chat sets the topic for the chat eg: "The one where __________"
• The host then invites other friends using the link.
• They all land on a screen where they are asked to choose the character which would twist their words and also enter their own name.
• Let the twisted chat begin.

Behind the scenes

• If a user called "Mary" has picked "Monica" all her texts will be redone by monica.
• Before sending the prompt to runway the server replaces all the personal names with the respective character names. Eg: If another user Tom picked Joey "Mary: I hate Tom and Tom's cat" becomes "Monica: I hate Joey and Joey's cat" where Tom has picked Joey.
• The response from runway is modified in the opposite way. ie replacing character names with the respective users before it gets sents to all the clients. eg: "Monica: I hate Joey and Joey's cat" becomes "Mary: I hate Tom and Tom's cat" becomes

Making the chat application

- The server for the app is made using NodeJS and SocketIO
- The client is made on VueJS and the routing is handled by vue-router

The chatrooms

The server maintains a reference to all chat rooms. A Chatroom has the following structure

|-- Topic
|-- Messages
|     |- [{
|           user:'Tom',
|           character:'Joey',
|           message:'Hi'
|         }]
|- onlineUsers
|     |- [{
|           socket:
|           user:'Tom',
|           character:'Joey'
|         }]

It communicates with the sockets and runway

Project setup

npm install

Compiles and hot-reloads for development

npm run serve

Compiles and minifies for production

npm run build

Lints and fixes files

npm run lint

Customize configuration

See Configuration Reference.