Why dylan what were you doing during the collapse of the american goverment? Well that is an oddly personal question… but since you asked here we go.
I spent a majority of the last 4+ months building a python script that will animate characters talking. This is for “work” though it has morphed into so much more. I have finally been able to build my joke-a-tron bot. This all started with jokesareawesome a now defunct website that @harper made that was just a collection of jokes. I loved it. I used it. It was great.
For a while I would do a day of jokes on Twitter (which I will never ever call X) where I would post a joke every 5, 10 or 15 minutes. During this time harper provided me with a spreadsheet of all the jokes are awesome jokes. It was great but it was a ton of work. I thought about automating a bot to do it but that was well out of my wheelhouse of skills.
UNTIL AI!!!
Say what you will about artificial intelligence but it is super duper fun. I know that the way it has been trained has been not great because it has been stealing stuff and all that, but as someone with ADHD it fits well with my hyperfocus. Like super well. And I have learned a ton both from the AI and from general research on things that fascinate me.
You may not know this about me but I love cartoons and animation (and drawing, and making stuff and all that). The problem is that my lack of focus has led me to pursue all of the things and I lose interest just as fast. So by combining all of the things I love into one project I was able to actually create things.
In case you want… here are all of the github repos I made to create this project.
toon-in speech-aligner 2d-voice-sync
There are couple of them that I am still working on. The reason for so many is I am really good at overwhelming myself with features I want. And I am bad at managing my repos so when I get frustrated I take what works and start over. I am going to keep working on making the joke-a-tron work and then I will start posting jokes here.
When I first started I tried to find other projects that did similar things but most of them were outdated or used libraries that were outdated. I also tried out using different AIs for the coding help and found that they all are good at different things and I find my self using Claude the most. It seems to be the most consistent and I have rarely ran into the limits when working.
I also started playing with Eleven labs to create voices and to do the actual voice work for the jokes. Combining my script with some assets that I paid someone to make on fivrrrrrr has really brought it all together. Now I just need to keep refining and then it will be awesome.