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Outcome

Intention

The intention of Kenzington is to share a little bit of information about MacKenzie, a lot of apologies, and a few GIFs. It's not an extensive list of actions, but it hopefully gives you some insight into who MacKenzie is as a human.

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Context

The general outcome of questions (who, where, when, why) returns simple information about MacKenzie, but mostly you can enter in random words and get a GIF back. Basically, this is how MacKenzie's mind works, but it's hard spit out Disney related GIFs in real life.

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Process

I started out building Kenzington's personality and seeing how she might respond, what she sounds like, even what she looks like. From there, I looked at different conversation flows that may occur. While I had grand plans to incorporate movie quotes and lyrics, I soon realized I needed to scope down and tackle one obstacle at a time.

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Product

I incorporated giphy to try and bring some personality through. This was a bit tricky and even slowed things down a bit. I was happy to have gotten the giphy gem to accept two search terms instead of one. I wanted to be able to have Kenzington return a Disney related GIF. To do so, I needed to add "disney" to every search query, no matter what the user texted. To do so, I used the following code...

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def get_gif

  searchName =  "disney " + " " + params[:Body].to_s
  results = Giphy.search( searchName, {limit: 10})
  gif = nil

  #puts results.to_yaml
  unless results.empty?
    gif = results.sample.fixed_width_downsampled_image.url.to_s
  end

  gif

end

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Reflection

Moving forward, I want to continue to iterate and improve this project. I really enjoyed thinking about the conversation that could happen, the question that could be asked, and the random responses that map to my ADHD mind. I feel this project can be greatly improved upon.