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Projects / Virtual Assitant

Virtual Assistant

This was the first major project that I did for my MYP Personal Project. It enabled me to learn much more about Python and think independently. The features that are currently integrated within this version include:

• Speech recognition using the SpeechRecognition library (Speech-to-Text)
• Text-to-Speech using the pyttsx3 library
• Jokes, puns, and facts that are randomly selected from a specified list (could use an API now that I have learned about it)
• Wishing the user based on the time and also telling the time using the datetime module
• Simple answers to basic questions (origin, creator, etc.)
• Wikipedia searches using the wikipedia library
• Opening the news (The Straits Times) and searching the Internet using the webbrowser module
• Self-made simple games including:
  • Magic 8-ball
  • Unpredictable Numbers
  • Lucky 7
• Opening applications (YouTube, Chrome, Atom, Discord) using the webbrowser module and the os module
• Shutting down and logging off the computer using the subprocess module
• Cheesy easter eggs inspired by Google Assistant!

I was able to expand my knowledge immensely through this project and also wrote my first decent program without following any tutorials - Magic 8-ball. From thereon, there was no stopping me, and I went on to program all the games of the virtual assistant without any tutorials. However, for most of the other features, I had to research and follow tutorials (like this) to first understand the basic concepts. One thing that I tried to focus on was accessibility. I tried to make my program as accessible as possible by making sure that the program both spoke and printed out text whenever there was an output. Similarly, I added manual user input through the keyboard for certain parts of the program instead of voice recognition. I was quite pleased with the outcome and will never forget this journey.