Bard – An Experiment in Robot Poetry
Hey HN, This is a small project I made for a meetup (Creative Coding Amsterdam's poetry afternoon). With all the hype around LLMs these days, I wanted to create something silly and fun. I ended up with Glitchy BARD, which generates crappy poetry. It uses source text transformed into n-grams, while rhymes rely on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary[0]. For the voice, I used the native SpeechSynthesis API instead of a fancy AI one. Everything runs on the client, but you can share a song via URL, which includes the random number generator seed. It's open source[1], though the code is a bit chaotic…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, This is a small project I made for a meetup (Creative Coding Amsterdam's poetry afternoon). With all the hype around LLMs these days, I wanted to create something silly and fun. I ended up with Glitchy BARD, which generates crappy poetry. It uses source text transformed into n-grams, while rhymes rely on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary[0]. For the voice, I used the native SpeechSynthesis API instead of a fancy AI one. Everything runs on the client, but you can share a song via URL, which includes the random number generator seed. It's open source[1], though the code is a bit chaotic as I was experimenting a lot and never cleaned it up. A blog post about the CSS glitch effect[2] even gained some traction on HN. I'd like to turn this into a proper talk, mostly because it was so much fun to make and touched a lot of different areas - language models, rhymes and poetry, pixel art (which is a pain do to on web), speech synthesis, CSS animations... I gave an internal presentation at my company and got very positive feedback. So let me know what you think and if you have any questions about BARD, please shoot. [0] http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict [1] https://github.com/Stanko/bard/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221907 edit: link formatting
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