@WeatherBot

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

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 BBC weather.

Why did you make it?

BBC 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 BBC 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 BBC 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 BBC 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!