It's not specifically just for me but for my team at the World Largest Trivia Contest [0]. It's a 54 hour long contest, questions are broadcast over the radio, you have the length of 2 songs to call in the answers, and you can use any source to find the answer. Sounds easy, right? Just Google it? Nope. "In a big screen flick, XYZ is talking to ABC about something. In the background, a train passes. What does it say on the train?"
This has led to a ton of fun little coding projects to help us answer questions better. A lot of very hard to Google questions involve album covers, so I ran every album cover I could get through Google Vision and built a little search engine. Another part of the contest is short (1-2s) clips of songs being broadcast and you have a few hours to come up with what they are. We built a massive fingerprint library ahead of time and used it to answer some of those (Google finally got better at this too, before we built this, it'd never work because the clip was so short). We also use AWS to live transcribe the broadcast because one of the hardest parts was remembering "were they asking for the actor? their character? the movie?" and having to wait until they ask the question again between songs.
Next up is a parallel auto-dialer. There's only a handful of people answering phones, so actually calling in the answer can be a struggle.
Love this! A simple innocent trivia game (I assume this isnt a professional thing) blown completely out of proportion by competitiveness. Its just in that sweetspot where the tradeoff between effort to write tools vs the gain from using tools is in balance (it seems). I can totally see myself doing this.
Oh definitely not professional. I'm not sure the team that wins even gets money, but a trophy and bragging rights is worth a lot. It's a ton of fun and you can compete (mostly) online each year!
This has led to a ton of fun little coding projects to help us answer questions better. A lot of very hard to Google questions involve album covers, so I ran every album cover I could get through Google Vision and built a little search engine. Another part of the contest is short (1-2s) clips of songs being broadcast and you have a few hours to come up with what they are. We built a massive fingerprint library ahead of time and used it to answer some of those (Google finally got better at this too, before we built this, it'd never work because the clip was so short). We also use AWS to live transcribe the broadcast because one of the hardest parts was remembering "were they asking for the actor? their character? the movie?" and having to wait until they ask the question again between songs.
Next up is a parallel auto-dialer. There's only a handful of people answering phones, so actually calling in the answer can be a struggle.
[0] http://90fmtrivia.org