91Èȱ¬

The day’s weather, just for you, on demand. Tweet a request and - bingo! – your very own forecast, straight from the 91Èȱ¬.

We had a chat with the makers of @WeatherBot

What is @WeatherBot?

It’s an automated bot that receives tweets and generates a response. As long as the tweet has a location and a time over the next three days, the bot picks that information out and collects the relevant data from 91Èȱ¬ weather.

Why did you make it?

91Èȱ¬ Weather wanted to mix things up a little, so we put our heads together with indie Nixon McInnes and planned for something a little bit different.

We wanted to work with geo-specific data and we wanted to serve the social media savvy. And we loved the challenge of short, sharp and personal weather forecast. So we dreamt up… @WeatherBot.

How did you make it?

Hmm, a bit trickier than you might first think. Here comes the jargon… we mainly used Python, which wasn’t supported by the 91Èȱ¬ at the time (first challenge). Then we turned to Java for the Natural Language Processing (NLP) functions. For admin tools we chose Ruby via the Rails application framework so the 91Èȱ¬ Weather team could be truly responsive.

In lay terms, there’s a bit of a production line going on here:
1. We extract the location and date from your request to @bbcweatherbot.
2. We get the right weather forecast data for you using the 91Èȱ¬ Weather APIs.
3. We create your tweet forecast – and the text should always read naturally, whatever the weather!

Any other challenges?

There were a few hurdles to jump along the way – eg, did you know there are 10 places in the UK called Newport?!

So not exactly a walk in the park though we hope the result looks effortless and means you can plan a walk in the park in glorious sunshine!