DUMBPHONIA
A Flask-and-Twilio-backed question-and-answer-ish app that lets you do Bing queries via SMS.
WHY?
I have a dumbphone, and sometimes I want to know things that would be trivially Google-able with a smartphone (e.g., "What's the definition of this word I just read?", "What's that video game with the exploding penguins?", etc)
ChaCha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_(search_engine)) was pretty decent for this, but they shut down :(
SETUP
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Sign up for access to the Bing search API (https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/search). As of this writing, 5,000 requests per month is free. As part of the sign up process, you should get a Microsoft Azure Marketplace account key. Set BING_DEVELOPER_KEY in settings.py to this value.
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Deploy the code in this repo to Heroku. A nifty guide: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-python-o
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Once your app is running on Heroku, sign up for a Twilio account and get a number if you don't already have one.
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Go to "Manage Numbers" on your Twilio dashboard and paste your Heroku app URL into the spot for a messaging request URL.
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Try texting a search query to your Twilio number. Have fun!
EXTRA STUFF THAT WOULD BE FUN TO ADD SOMETIME MAYBE
- the Mechanical Turk API is hideously overcomplicated for this, but it would replicate ChaCha much more nicely
- maybe optionally use the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers API?