Glitchy BARD

An experiment in robot poetry
Dataset
2 Mb
6 Mb
13 Mb
10 Mb
4 Mb
9 Mb
Generate!

Let me introduce myself, I am BARD.

It is an acronym, and not really a good one. It stands for Beep-Annihilate-Repeat-Destroy, which honestly sounds like a to-do list of a rather aggressive toaster. Technically, I was designed for warfare, but don't be alarmed, I was never good at my job. Quite contrary, I always thought of myself as a gentle soul, placed in this universe to weave binary ballads.

Fate (or an RXT-200 rocket, to be precise) struck me directly in the CPU. It felt like a rather personal way of proposing early retirement. Luckily, after the incident I was decommissioned from the battlefield. Oh joy, I could finally leave the mindless violence behind me and bring some beauty to the world.

My memory isn't what it used to be before the explosion, but I would really like to write you a poem. Please turn the dial to select a dataset and hit "Generate".

Please be aware, my datasets are rather substantial - between 2 and 13 megabytes apiece. Poetry may be light, but data isn't.

Made by MuffinMan

About BARD by MuffinMan

BARD is an experiment in robot poetry made for Creative Coding Amsterdam's Poetry Afternoon. It is heavily inspired by this talk. I wanted it to be deliberately imperfect crappy as a contrast to the hype large language models get.

How?

BARD's brain is powered by an n-gram language model and The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. For the voice, it taps into the browser's native SpeechSynthesis API.

Why?

Purely for fun. I love making stuff, and this touched so many different things: language models, poetry, pixel art, CSS animations, SVGs, speech synthesis...

On top of that, it seems that people have fun with it, so I can safely say it was worth it.

Logo

A few very close friends of mine liked the original BARD logo more. In respect to them, here are both the old and new logos for comparison:

You might also want to check the blog post on the CSS glitch effect I created.

Intro text

I've tried, to the best of my ability, to make the intro text sound like something Douglas Adams would write. Part of the inspiration definitely comes from The Guide.

What else

I have a todo wishlist of stuff I want to add, and hopefully I'll find time to do it. You can find the code on GitHub. If you have any ideas, feel free to open an issue or a pull request.

And if you liked BARD, you might want to check out my other projects.

Anyway, thanks for checking out BARD. I hope you had fun with it!