straup/markov-phone

Markov bots. That robo-call you. As a service.

markov-phone

"You do realise you just implemented the robocaller script that caused downfall of humanity in Dollhouse, right?" – Dan Hon

What is this?

Markov bots. That robo-call you. As a service.

sayer.js

This is the thing that generates the Markov texts and returns them as a valid TwiML document.

$> node sayer.js --seed data/thisisaaronbot.txt --name 'Aaron Bot' --port 6677

For example:

<Response>
	<Say>This is Aaron Bot, as a service.</Say>
	<Pause/>
	<Say>the set aside from the sky GOD LET bake for date taken justin bieber. earnest love you gotta wear glittery yet damien sacks hirst sippy.</Say>
</Response>

You can also request a plain vanilla text version by passing in an Accept: text/plain HTTP header, like this:

$> curl -H 'Accept: text/plain' http://localhost:6677
oakland like is miller frank. internet in the hockey series will be in sydney.

If you need to run sayer.js as a specific user you can specify a --uid parameter, like this:

$> sudo node sayer.js --seed data/thisisaaronbot.txt --name 'Aaron Bot' --uid 999

Note the sudo-iness of that example which is just short-hand for "you'll still need suitable permissions to be able to do things like switch user IDs".

--doge

Also, there's a --doge flag. No, really...

$> node sayer.js --seed data/hondanhon.txt --port 6677 --doge

$> curl -H 'Accept: text/plain' 'http://localhost:6677'

very refreshingly amaze educatedish wow pseudo-closed much scrapbooking how rediscovered wow mobile/social/communications much rose-tinted

caller.py

This is the thing that calls one or more people from your Twilio account. Note the part where we are passing the url for the sayer.js server. This is what will be sent to the phone numbers you've specified.

$> python caller.py --sid TWILIO_SID --token TWILIO_TOKEN --from TWILIO_NUMBER --url http://example.com:6677 PHONENUMBER_ONE PHONENUMBER_TWO 

putter.py

This is a thing that will collect the output sayer.js and save it to an S3 bucket as a named key. This might be useful if you want to send the same message to a number of people.

$> python putter.py -u http://localhost:6677 -k AWS_ACCESSKEY -s AWS_SECRETKEY -b S3_BUCKETNAME -n MARKOVPHONE.xml

daily.sh

daily.sh is a simple shell script that wraps up all the other tools in "markov-phone" allowing them to be run every day as a cron job, or equivalent. Think of it as like a mailing-list but one that calls people.

It does the following:

• Reads configuration data from a daily.cfg file. This contains things like the location of sayer.js seed data, your AWS and Twilio account credentials, the phone numbers you want to call to from and any other data specific to you.
• Starts up a copy of sayer.js on the local machine using a high-numbered TCP port.
• Runs the putter.py script to collect data from the freshly invoked sayer.js server, saving the results to Amazon's S3 service as file named after the current date (YYYY-MM-DD.xml).
• Runs the caller.py script to call one or more phone numbers using the Twilio API specifying the just created YYYY-MM-DD.xml file as its input.
• Stops the sayer.js server.

Here's an example of a daily.cfg file. Note that the ${ROOT} and ${DAILY} variables are defined in daily.sh script.

# sayer.js configs

MRKVPH_SAYER_NAME="Markov Bot"
MRKVPH_SAYER_SEED=${ROOT}data/thisisaaronbot.txt
MRKVPH_SAYER_HOST=localhost
MRKVPH_SAYER_PORT=9922
MRKVPH_SAYER_URL="http://${MRKVPH_SAYER_HOST}:${MRKVPH_SAYER_PORT}"

# putter.py configs

MRKVPH_AWS_KEY=S33KRET_AWS_KEY
MRKVPH_AWS_SECRET=S33KRET_AWS_SECRET
MRKVPH_S3_BUCKET=markovphone

# caller.py configs

MRKVPH_TWILIO_SID=S33KRET_TWILIO_SID
MRKVPH_TWILIO_TOKEN=S33KRET_TWILIO_TOKEN
MRKVPH_TWILIO_FROM=2025551212
MRKVPH_TWILIO_TO=5145551212
MRKVPH_TWILIO_URL="http://${MRKVPH_S3_BUCKET}.s3.amazonaws.com/${DAILY}"

Seed data

You can specify anything that the node-markov package can read. I've included the latest seed data for the @thisisaaronbot Twitter account and a still-needs-to-be-cleaned-up extract of Dan Hon's Things That Have Caught My Attention mailing list as examples.

Why did you do this?

I was waiting for a small universe of Java stuff to finish downloading and installing itself. I figured I would do something... useful with the time.

Requirements

twilio

• A valid Twilio account with enough credit to send outgoing phone calls.

S3

For use with putter.py

• A valid Amazon Web Services account.

node.js

• node-markov
• node-optimist - I just noticed this has been deprecated so patches are welcome.
• node-strip

python

• twilio-python

See also

• https://github.com/bertrandom/thisisaaronbot
• https://tinyletter.com/danhon