Digital Kitchen's Twitter-activated player piano, Stanley, made its debut a year before I joined the agency. It was one of the reasons I had heard of DK, and one of the reasons I wanted to work for them.
Stanley was an installation created for the Capitol Hill Block Party. People would tweet their song requests, and a team of DKers would respond behind the scenes - giving Stanley a voice by tweeting back in real time, and displaying the dialogue on a screen above the piano. The results were magical, and garnered a lot of attention.
When Twitter approached us a couple years later and asked us to build a version of Stanley for their HQ, we jumped at the chance. The challenge was that we would no longer have a team of people to respond to tweets, play the requested song, and respond back in character. This all had to be automated.
We created a larger database of songs (around 500), and put a back-end system in place to figure out what the request was, if we had it in our system, and how play the next closest thing if we didn't (a different song by the same artist, or a song from a related artist). A database of random, canned responses approximated Stanley's human voice.
The result, while a little more robotic, still feels magical, and continues to delight Twitter employees and visitors daily.
My Role: system architecture, back-end development
Made with: node, javascript, Chrome, Max