In summer 2016, on the side of some brand chatbot work I was doing, I created a Facebook Messenger bot named 808bot using an IBM Watson natural language classifier (AI, machine learning, whatever you want to call it) that answered questions about the Roland TR-808 synthesiser and gave recommendations to tracks on YouTube made using one. 808bot never got its public launch due to the data calls potentially bankrupting me 🙂

To cheer myself up I made @bestmixbot on Twitter instead. It’s a classic random text generator and makes no claims to intelligence, artificial or otherwise. The style of the bot rips off the copy that accompanies DJ mixes published by online music magazines and randomly generates an eclectic right-on selection twice a day. Tweet mentioning its handle and it will reply with something ‘just for you’.

A further iteration of this project could be to write some code that crawls FACT or XLR8R magazine looking for new artist names to keep the contemporary music references up to date.

The final stage would be actually putting together some of these mixes forrrrrreal.