Zoombot - Automated Video Meeting AI

Let me just say, Zoom is an incredible video conferencing tool, however, it’s become SO useful during this Worldwide WFH-athon that my number of Zoom meetings have gone through the mesosphere and is currently on Mars. There's barely even time for bio-breaks, Reddit, or actually getting work done.  It’s as if Zoom has turned into the Oasis from Ready Player One where everyone spends every waking hour of their day inside.

It's Zoom's world now. We're just living in it. All day long.

- @johnbattelle on Twitter

So, in order to reclaim some of my precious time I built a Digital Twin of myself that uses the latest in advanced AI Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech to handle my Zoom meetings for me. 

How to Clone Yourself

As it turns out, cloning oneself is actually much easier than Westworld would lead you to believe.  I took a few screenshots of myself after opening Quicktime and doing File -> New Movie Recording. Next I just built a very-well-coded™ webapp that uses an open source library called Artyom.js to listen and respond. I programmed it to listen for phrases like…

• “How are you?” replies “I’m doing great thank you for asking”
• “Did you get that?" replies “I’m having trouble hearing you”
• “Bye” replies “Talk to everybody later. Be safe”
  

...while cycling through those still shots of myself in a very choppy fashion; obviously Zoombot has a bad connection.  I then set up a Virtual Webcam with the webapp as the source using some software called ManyCam. That creates a system-wide video input that you can set your Zoom webcam to.

Now just crank up those speakers, fire up Zoombot, and freely go forth and enjoy all those other things you’d rather be doing than sitting on video conferences all day. Just think, you could go play with the birds in your backyard, stare at your dog, make a fun smoothie, the possibilities are finite. So what would you do with your newly acquired free time? Leave a comment below, or not, I don’t think we have comments enabled here but you can tell us on Twitter too :)

If you’re interested in making your own Zoombot you can get a copy of it over here and customize it. If you have any questions drop me a line over at twitter.com/mcreed and I'll be happy to help! Talk to everybody later. Be safe.