I was at a hackathon recently and I won the best use of wolfram technologies prize. I basically made a texting service, and one of the features that I implemented was the ability to ask questions, which the service would then answer by querying wolfram alpha. I kinda don’t want to post the number here cause it’ll cost me a lot of money if it gets out, but it was pretty cool.
I used the Wolfram Alpha API, Google App Engine as a backend (with Python), and Twilio as the SMS API.
Update:
Here’s some code that y’all might find interesting:
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This is a class that searches for queries on wolfram alpha. Basically you create a wolfram class and pass in your ID and then you can call search on a query.
import urllib2 import urllib import httplib from xml.etree import ElementTree as etree import sys class wolfram(object): def __init__(self, appid): self.appid = appid self.base_url = 'http://api.wolframalpha.com/v2/query?' self.headers = {'User-Agent':None} def _get_xml(self, ip): url_params = {'input':ip, 'appid':self.appid} data = urllib.urlencode(url_params) req = urllib2.Request(self.base_url, data, self.headers) xml = urllib2.urlopen(req).read() return xml def _xmlparser(self, xml): data_dics = {} tree = etree.fromstring(xml) #retrieving every tag with label 'plaintext' for e in tree.findall('pod'): for item in [ef for ef in list(e) if ef.tag=='subpod']: for it in [i for i in list(item) if i.tag=='plaintext']: if it.tag=='plaintext': data_dics[e.get('title')] = it.text return data_dics def search(self, ip): xml = self._get_xml(ip) result_dics = self._xmlparser(xml) for key, value in result_dics.iteritems(): val = result_dics[key] try: result_dics[key] = val.encode('ascii', 'ignore') except Exception: pass valList = result_dics.values() keyList = result_dics.keys() if 'Result' in result_dics.keys(): return result_dics['Result'] elif 'Response' in result_dics.keys(): return result_dics['Response'] elif self.checkForString('Weather forecast for', result_dics): return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('Weather forecast for', result_dics)]] elif self.checkForString('Results', result_dics): return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('Results', result_dics)]] elif self.checkForString('Corporate', result_dics): return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('Corporate', result_dics)]] elif self.checkForString('Basic', result_dics): return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('Basic', result_dics)]] elif self.checkForString('IP address', result_dics): return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('IP address', result_dics)]] elif self.checkForString('date', result_dics): return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('date', result_dics)]] else: return "I don't understand. Sorry! Type COMMANDS to see the list of available commands." def checkForString(self, checkStr, myDict): keyList = myDict.keys() for key in keyList: if checkStr in key: return True return False def getIndexOfString(self, checkStr, myDict): keyList = myDict.keys() for x in range(len(keyList)): if checkStr in keyList[x]: return x -
This is some code that calls the Twilio API to create a reply to a query. Twilio is a REST API that lets you set up SMS projects pretty easily. Here’s some code that replies to an SMS. What this does is create an XML page that the Twilio API can call from your project. Basically you create a REST API that twilio can call and post the TwiML for twilio to use and send. In my case I used Google App Engine and webapp2, but you can use flask or other web APIs.
twilio_resp = twilio.twiml.Response() twilio_resp.sms(reply) self.response.out.write(str(twilio_resp) + "\n")
(reply is the string that is you query from Wolfram Alpha)