Word Of The Day Skill

A case study on the Mycroft AI powered word of the day skill I wrote in 2018.

Description

Welcome to my case study of the Word of the Day Skill I implemented in college! This skill was intended to leverage Mycroft, the hackable open source voice assistant to provide you the "word of the day" and its definition. Current words and definitions come from Dictionary.com.

Table of Contents

• What I would change today
• Usage
• Credits

What I would change today

Ok folks, it's 2022! It's been about 4 years since I've worked on this project. I don't intend on refactoring, primarily to use this as a learning opportunity, but here are some notes on what I would change today:

1. Use an http client:
   • Why did I not use one? Hard to believe, but in 2018, there was no readily available word of the day APIs that I could use (or afford on a college student's budget) Instead I opted to use BeautifulSoup to scrape the data I needed from the html at Dictionary.com.
   • How does this pose potential issues? Relying on scraping HTML can cause broken functionality, especially since the UI is expected to change (and I'm sure it has). It's not as reliable as working with an API where you know you will get the exact data you need in the format you need it.
   • Which client would I use now? Most likely requests or urllib3 since both have all the functionality I'd need to make a basic GET request in addition to human-friendly documentation. :)
   • Which API would I use? Probably the WordNik API or Words API because they have a host of fun, funky educational endpoints besides word of the day capability.
2. Write More Tests:
   • Why? To make sure that the skill works, duh! The software test engineer in me today is shaking at the fact that I only wrote 1 test for this 4 years ago. Especially since there are at least 3 other meaningful tests I could have written for it. Alas, we live and we learn and give ourselves grace.
3. Write code that's more readable:
   • I'd take a gander to say that you are probably a fan of code that is easy to read too. I mean, who isn't?! There are several ways to employ this, but in this case, I would have changed the code below to be self-documenting, by extracting methods with names that tell exactly what they're doing:

   def handle_word_of_the_day_intent(self, message):
       self.speak_dialog("word.of.day")
   
       url = "http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/"
   
       website = urllib2.urlopen(url)
   
       soup = BeautifulSoup(website, 'html.parser')
   
       # Extract word of day:
       word = soup.title.string
       replace_dict = { 'Get the Word of the Day - ': '', ' | Dictionary.com': '' }
       word_of_day = replace_all(word, replace_dict)
   
       # Extract definition:
       defin = soup.ol.li.span
       def_str = str(defin)
       replace_dict = { '<span>': '', '<em>': '', '</em>': '', '</span>': ''}
       def_str = replace_all(def_str, replace_dict)

to look a little more something like

def handle_word_of_the_day_intent(self, message):
    unextracted_word = get_word()
    extracted_word = extract_word()
    speak_word(extracted_word)

• Why does this help? Because it gives cleaner, conciser code. It doesn't require comments because the methods are named in such a way that it is obvious what the code does, and it shows you only what you need to do in the handle_word_of_the_day_intent method.

Usage

This skill is no longer useable since Dictionary.com has updated their UI and the instability of my code was exposed LOL. BUT, if it did work, you'd run Mycroft and say:

• "tell me the word of the day"
• "word of the day"
• "word of day"

Credits

• Fatima Mohamed
• Dictionary.com
• Mycroft AI