Despasirito

Inspiration

The cyberpunk theme inspired us to create a voice assistant, given how prevalent Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have become in the realm of technological innovation. In the future, voice assistants will be super unnecessary since they can read our minds, so we won’t even need to talk to them anymore. We used this as inspiration for our product. We wanted to create a functional product that is 'useless', but will be loved by a cyberpunk fan. As such, we have included easter eggs inspired by The Matrix, Akira, and Blade Runner. And, Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber's artistry inspired our choice of music.

What it does

Despasirito will listen to your prompts, and then just tell Alexa to play Despacito. However, it will respond to certain easter eggs.

If you prompt Despasirito with "Kaneda", it will respond “That's Mr. Kaneda to you, punk!” (in reference to Akira).
If you prompt Despasirito with "Where is my spoon?", it will respond “There is no spoon” (in reference to The Matrix).
If you ask Despasirito "What's the weather like today?", it will display digital rain and play the audio "The Matrix is everywhere" (in reference to The Matrix).
If you prompt Despasirito with "Despacito", it will play a 'cyberpunk' remix of Despacito.
If you ask Despasirito to wake you up later (in any amount of time), it will tell you “No, Wake up now. It’s time to die!” (in reference to Blade Runner).

How we built it

We used Javascript and JQuery, as well as the Meyda audio feature extraction library and the Web Speech API to run speech to text detection. We also implemented some existing code snippets for parts of our visualization and speech recognition.

Challenges we ran into

The most difficult part of our product to build was the voice recognition and response of the easter eggs. We learned how to use the Web Speech API and Meyda Javascript libraries, and we troubleshooted text inputs like "Kaneda," which is not a standard English word.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our product as a whole, and especially of our easter eggs. In particular, the digital rain easter egg is one of our favorite features, because of the more complex mechanics. It must recognize the command, and then modify the website display. Then, it must start the Morpheus audio.

What we learned

We learned how to create a voice assistant. We gained experience using the SpeechRecognition and Meyda Javascript libraries, and we also learned a lot about cyberpunk!

What's next for Despasirito

New features Despasirito can incorporate are more easter eggs. Candidates include the Cyberpunk video game, as well as references to various cyberpunk films, television shows, and video games.