Building a personal Twitter Bot using Markov chains

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A short announcements that I have now created my own alter ego in the form of a Twitter bot. It goes by the handle of @Bachfischer_bot and you can follow it on Twitter.

If you want to interact with the bot, you must include #FamousQuotesFromRoding in your tweet and it’ll reply to you (Roding is a small village in Bavaria and also my hometown).

The bot works by using Markov chains, which can generate text that looks superficially good, but is actually quite nonsensical. I trained it on Adam Smith’s book “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, so don’t be surprised if it engages with you in a discusson on free markets and economic affairs.

At some point in the future, I might consider to improve the bot to work with GPT2 (or another language model) or write up a more detailed blog post on the tech stack that I used to deploy the bot (Google Cloud App Engine).