My Progress with Developing a Social Media Robot: Sociomancer
It does video editing, video combining, captions adding, script writing, hashtag finding, and prepares a post to be shared right away!
Have you ever felt anxiety because of this era of social media?
I am going to draw a pretty pessimistic picture here: Even if you write a book, develop a game, or make an art exhibition, and even if your creation is AMAZING, your efforts will be a bit wasted due to the lack of a proper audience. Very few people are aware of your existence, very few people know you, and very few appreciate what you achieve.
Sometimes I hear these kinds of complaints from people around me, and yet I sometimes feel the same.
The problem is that I don't feel like spending precious time working hard for a "social media account" to find something to share consistently and to gain followers. I don't really enjoy the process of editing meaningless dummy videos or, even worse, doing random sh*t and sharing those sh*tty sh*ts! Sorry, I am a bit boomer 😅
In the end, the situation sounds like I can't fit in this social media era as lots of people do. At least with the same roadmap of being active on a social media platform.
So, I decided to develop software that will be less boomer than me and will do all the sh*t behalf of me. And, I will enjoy my automated social media account and new followers :)
The Inspiration
The inspiration came from the Reddit story compositions. There are lots of similar video compositions lately though, you might come across some of them.
The formula of these videos is simple:
- Use a relaxing, catchy, but irrelevant video in the background
- Find an interesting short story
- Use captions, subtitles, or direct screenshots of the written story (Mostly, people are using social media without a sound. A total of 85 percent of people on Facebook mute their videos while watching!)
- Dub the story in the video with your own voice or an automated robotic Siri voice
Status of my Project
I developed the simple semi-manual version of the project and named it Sociomancer (since my code will spawn slave-zombie-social-media-accounts!)
Manual part:
- I gather 2 youtube videos
- Write or rephrase a short story
- I feed my software with the youtube links and the story text
Auto part by Sociomancer:
- Sociomancer converts that text into a speech by using some other software under the hood.
- Generates captions from the text
- Downloads youtube videos from the links
- Merges 2 catchy youtube videos vertically
- Combines the robotically-spoken story, captions, and merged youtube videos and generates the final video content for me
What is next?
I still need to automate the "sharing" process.
Sharing process also includes the post caption along with the video. So, I need hashtags!
Luckily, in the past, I created an app that generates relevant hashtags from keywords you enter. I think I will use my own app to generate the post caption as a list of hashtags at the beginning and I’ll try to polish it later.
The last step will be using the developer-friendly interfaces (APIs) of Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or whatever is available out there to post the outcome!
I will be sharing the progress and outcomes. So, keep in touch!
I would love to hear your thoughts and own experiences below in the comments. If you want to hear more, please let me know!
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All the best!
