June Project: Googly Eye Bot

This month’s project was something of a success, though I’m late on the write-up. The suggestion came from my partner Lisa, who proposed something like it for our friends’ group.

GooglyEyeBot sits in a server and, with a configurable random probability, replies to a message and applies Googly Eyes. It can also be set to only apply googly eyes when tagged, which I’ve made the default.

Things that went well:

• First version was very fast to produce. Used MediaPipe with the expectation that I’d find time to retrain a face model when the time came.
• Discord.py is rather nice, even if “the right way” to do something is a little impenetrable at times. I found myself looking for how messages would connect with each other. I think Discord itself is moving through some changes, so it makes sense.

Things that were tricky:

• I’m still not entirely sure how to determine if the user sending a command is an administrator of the server (guild).
• Never got around to making my own face or training set.

Repo: https://github.com/JosephCatrambone/googlyeyebot