Whose project is this?

Aaron

Project Description

Hacking into a standard telephone, when you lift the receiver, you will hear a short message that a random person has posted to the Twitter.com website.

Many posts to Twitter are not in English. I need to filter out all the posts except the English ones. To do this, I plan to use a program written in Perl which can identify the language of text given to it.

I am debating including a caller-id type display on the phone which will show the Twitter username and location of the person whose message you are hearing. I will only consider this if I get the rest of the project done in good time.

Useful Links

• Twitter API

• Lingua::Identify Perl Module
• Twitter public timeline

Update 3/10

At this point I have written the code to download the latest Twitter posts, and identify their language. Only the ones that it thinks are English are inserted into the database. Looking over its results, it is not perfect at identifying the language. Specifically, it has problems with short posts of only a few words. This is a general problem with identifying the language of text, and can be demonstrated like so: Take a word that is spelled the same in two languages. Try to identify the language of that word. You can't, because it's out of context. However, you can say that it looks like one or more languages.

The code returns the probability of its guess being correct. With such short text like that on Twitter, I was seeing probabilities between 1-20%. After looking through lots of sample data, I determined that a reasonable threshold is 10%. If the code is 10% confident that its guess of "English" is correct, then I add that to the database. So far it has produced pretty good results, with only a few incorrect guesses.

Here is the code so far:

http://www.pin13.net/twitterphone/code.php

At this point I am ready to begin the text to speech work.

Update 3/11

I started hacking into the phone I am using to wire it up to connect to the computer. I got out my dremel, and started sketching out holes with a pencil. I needed one hole for the USB, and another hole for the audio jack. Then I started thinking about how I was going to attach the USB port inside the phone, what type of glue to use, where to locate it, etc. I had visions of building a standalone Arduino to sit inside the phone, and it all seemed kind of daunting. Then I realized that I don't actually need the USB connection at all. I can just have the audio continuously playing through the speaker. I don't think there is much lost in not having the audio start until after you pick up the receiver. This simplifies things greatly!

On to the audio jack... or not.... While it would be kind of cool to have an audio jack hacked into the phone, it isn't really necessary. Instead, I can do the conversion from telephone jack to 1/8" audio jack in the cable outside the phone. I am building a custom cable that plugs into the computer on one end, and the telephone jack on the other. All it takes is a little reconfiguring of the wiring inside the phone.

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