TuneTeller
Authors: Antti Rask
Abstract: Shortly, the idea of the app is to provide the user with music recommendations, using two APIs: Open AI for the recommendation and Spotify for the artist information.
Here's what the user can expect to do and see when they click through the app:
- When you come to the page, you see the title and the thumbnail image that is used as a placeholder.
- Other than that, you can see a text box and two buttons (red and gray).
- You can write anything (under 190 characters) to the text box and push the red button to get a recommendation (one artist)
- You will see an image, artist's name, description telling you what artist was chosen and why, their Spotify follower amount and a green button that you can push to take you to the artist's page on Spotify.
- At any point, you can push the gray button to empty the text box and start over.
Full Description: With modern technology, there have usually been two ways to search for music. Either you know the artist already and search for them. Or you let the algorithm take the wheel completely.
The inspiration for this app came from my past as a record store clerk. I wanted to create a music recommender that you could tell anything and they would then recommend you an artist you can listen to.
The prompt I settled with (so far) is this:
"Recommend one artist/band based on this prompt: {input$prompt}. Don't choose the best known entity.
The answer should have artist/band name on line one. Then a line break. Then a short description of the artist/band and an explanation for choosing that artist/band."
Before adding that first clause about not choosing the best-known entity, the recommendations were too obvious. One of the ideas was to come up with an app that could still surprise you, but in a positive manner.
I'm using Open AI's API with GPT 3.5 Turbo. One future improvement could be switching to GPT4o mini. But in order to do so I need to change the API endpoint from Completions to Chat/Completions.
Also, the app isn't yet mobile-optimized.
Nothing more to add at this point. This has been a fun learning journey! There's no way I would've been able to create this one without the help of ChatGPT, but there's also a lot of sweat equity put into it as well.
Shiny app: TuneTeller
Repo: GitHub - AnttiRask/music_recommender: A Shiny app for making music recommendations based on a natural language prompt. Uses OpenAI and Spotify APIs under the hood.
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