I'm currently working on a project where my main focus is to create an Action for Google Home which can be invoked and asked to read out some articles (chosen previously from a list, also by voice) from a particular website.
I was wondering if it was possible, or if it were already some similar projects.
What I'd like to do is something like the feature in Pocket or instapaper, where you can make the device read the article for you.
I also thought to make something like a database with all the articles I'm interested in, which auto-updates itself whenever a new article is posted, but my main concern now is to be able to separate the articles in various lists, parse the article and in the end implement text to speech into the Action.
Also some implementations with 3rd party services and apps would be useful.
Please ask me if anything isn't exactly clear, english is not my first language.
Yes, this is possible. Not necessarily easy, but possible.
First - there is nothing in the Actions on Google library or in Google Home that will automatically scrape a website. That will be up to you.
Second - Responses from your Action are limited in how much they can send at a time.
If you're having it do text-to-speech, you're limited to two "text bubbles" of 640 characters each before the user has to reply. You should keep well below that and should probably stick to just one "text bubble".
If you're playing an audio cut, then you're limited to two minutes.
You can work around both of these limitations by using the Media Response. With TTS, you would play a portion of the text, a brief Media response, at the conclusion of which, your server would be triggered to send the next chunk of text. If it is all recorded, you can just send the longer audio as the Media.
Be advised, however, that if you're using the inline editor or using Firebase Cloud Functions (which the inline editor uses), that by default you're not able to access most sites outside Google's network. You need to upgrade to a paid plan to do so. I suggest the Blaze plan which is pay-as-you-go, but includes a free tier which is typically good enough for development work and light production usage.
Related
I am currently running a website where I promote different coffees from pubs in my city. On my website I have links to the different coffees.
I have recently seen some of this links being shared on Facebook and other social networks.
So I was wondering if it is somehow possible to track how often one of this links are being clicked?
I have tried using redirects to my site but Facebook uses my pictures in the previews, whereas I don't want this because it is misleading.
I have seen that this works with Bitly so it must somehow be possible?
And there are of course different services providing this, but it would be nice if it would run without any foreign services.
So basically I am looking for a solution which will let me know how often a link, origination from my site was clicked in Facebook, Google+ or any other forum.
There definitely is. Try looking into Google Analytics, it will show you show much data from your personal websites and links that it can blow your mind! Here is the link
Google Analytics helps you analyze visitor traffic and paint a
complete picture of your audience and their needs. Track the routes
people take to reach you and the devices they use to get there with
reporting tools like Traffic Sources. Learn what people are looking
for and what they like with In-Page Analytics. Then tailor your
marketing and site content for maximum impact.
You can even get a free package to use!
Hope this helps!
Yes you have plenty of analytical options.
Something as straight forward as Google Analytics for example.
If you are using cpanel on your hosts server, you even have options such as AWSTATS, which will also provide information.
If all else fails you can even use post data stored in your apache / nginx logs.
Since you have amended your question you might want to check out this tool. It is not google. :)
It is called Click Meter and performs Link Tracking and provides click reports, etc
I am trying to work out where to put the responses to a GravityForm that I have hosted on WordPress. GravityForms displays them as entry/detail which is not a good way to see how many of x people there are etc.
I need an excel-esqe grid that can be edited by multiple users, so I was thinking Google docs, but I would rather keep the data on my server.
My end users are not particularly IT literate so the front end needs to be quite user friendly.
Is there any solution that I can host on my server and post data in to? I was playing with the idea of writing the form responses to a separate WordPress table but I need a very easy way to edit them.
I'd be grateful to hear any feedback or ideas you have
Manual data copy
EtherCalc is good. The problem is how to get the data in and out of the spreadsheet,
if a manual export and import will work, then you can use EtherCalc.
EtherCalc is a google docs style spreadsheet, edited by multiple users.
You can host it on your own server.
Pay a developer to automate
As above, but pay a developer to automate the movement of data. Would take a few days of work.
Google docs form
I saw a google docs forms plugin that does this already. Maybe you saw that already.
EtherCalc forms feature.
I will add a forms feature to EtherCalc over xmas.
I want to make an app where the users can post messages that will be displayed on a website. The users would need to create a username and password to be able to post.
The app would be like a twitter, but only be able to post through the app and read the last few posts and not be able to write private messages.
The website would function like a huge cloud of thoughts where everyone could go and read what others have written. Once the post hit the cloud, they can't be deleted. Only me could delete posts.
All posts would have different color and font size, it would look like a huge tag cloud on the website.
How do I make an app and a website like this?
David H
The tutorial application for Google Application Engine is an unstyled version of what you describe. They'll even host it for you for free (up to a non-trivial level of usage).
The tag cloud creation is not so very hard but without knowing your preferred language it is hard to point you to helpful libraries (there are plenty out there).
Getting people to use it will be the hard part.
added in response to comment:
Good luck on your endeavor. I would be surprised if you weren't able to learn everything you need to know and have a working web app by the time school starts. I found a simple stand alone web cloud creation library that explains what it does and will run on GAE. So now even that part is in place for you.
I'm tempted to make some pathetic reference to the sorts of computing that I did prior to high school, but I expect that you probably have SD data cards have more computational power than I had available to me. Kids these days! ;)
Would a script that sets display messages for instant messengers be simple or complex? After some searching, there doesn't seem to be any information about this at all.
For the sake of an example, if I had a text file of quotations, would it be possible to have the google talk display message change to a different quotation hourly?
Depends on which client you're using. As far as I know, Google's client doesn't offer any interface for plugins, but the open source instant messenger Pidgin does. I think there already is a plugin for what you want to do, but you can write your own using the documentation and examples they give you.
The complexity of writing something like this is based on how much C or Perl you know, since you can program in either of those for Pidgin. Reading code from other people's plugins, you should be able to figure out the Pidgin API.
You can use Kik API to programmatically send rich content and files between mobile applications. It is available for iPhone and Android platforms and takes only about 5 lines of code to integrate into your app. There is more info at the API website: http://www.kik.com/dev
Disclaimer: I'm on of the developers behind Kik API :)
I'm building a utility that will hopefully keep my wife in tune with how much money we have available.
I need a simple secure way of logging into my bank account and retrieving the balance.
Something like mechanize is the only method I can think of. I'm not even sure if that would work given the properly authenticated https that banks use.
Any ideas?
Write a perl script using LWP::UserAgent. It supports HTTPS connections. The only issue might be if the site requires javascript.
Web Client Programming with Perl has a few examples to get you started if you're not too familiar with perl.
If you really want to go there, get these extensions for Firefox: Live HTTP Headers, Firebug, FireCookie, and HttpFox. Also download cURL and a scripting language that can run cURL command-line tasks (or a scripting language like PHP or Perl that has access to cURL libraries directly).
I've started down this road for some idempotent GET tasks like getting PDFs of the S&P reports (of the stocks I track) from my online brokerage, and downloading the check images for my bank account. Both tasks are repetitive and slow ways of downloading data to my computer that the financial institutions don't provide any way of making it easier.
Here's why you shouldn't: (as a shortcut I'm going to call the archetypal large bank, brokerage, or other financial institution "BloatBank")
BloatBank is not likely to make public their API for accessing this kind of information. So it can change any time and all your hard work will be for naught. Whenever they change their mechanism, you'll have to adapt.
If BloatBank finds out you've been using automatic scripting to try to access your account information, they may ban you because you've violated their terms of service.
You might screw up, and the interaction between the hodgepodge of scripts on BloatBank's server, and your scripts that access your account, might cause a Bad Thing like closing your account. Testing this kind of script is tremendously difficult because you don't have any documentation about how their online service works, and you don't have a test account you can mess with.
(a variant of the above) You think you're safe because you're issuing GET requests. But BloatBank is just a crazy bank that doesn't know anything about REST, so there are some GET requests that can mess up your account.
If someone else does use your script to maliciously sniff your online password or mess with your account, any liability coverage from BloatBank may disappear because you've opened a security hole.
Why don't you teach your wife how to login to the bank herself? Or use Quicken (or Mint, etc) and teach her how to use the auto-download feature?
Have you checked out Watir? It is fantastic for automating web-browser actions. And since it's written in Ruby, you can take the results and store them in a DB (or email them to yourself) if needed.
If you are open to AIR, I'd say build an AIR app. I have worked with mechanize and I think it's cool. AIR gives you similar features with a richer GUI (see HTMLLoader and DOM manipulation of webpage).
If I were you, I'd simply pull the page and manipulate the DOM to suit my visual needs.
Please, if you find this easy to do for your bank please post your bank's name. If I have the same one I'll be closing my account.
More to your question. The process of loading a web page inside of your code rather than in a browser can be a black art, especially if their is any javascript involved. Your best bet would probably be embedding the IE Web Browser control in your app and then simulating key strokes and mouse clicks to arrive at your balance page. Then scrape the HTML for the balance.
I could try paying for Quicken and letting it do the balance downloading. Then I'd just need to find a way to get the number out of the software automatically.
This way I'm not violating any terms of service and I'm also reducing security risk since all "hacking" goes on locally.