It is important to know how technology works if you are to design with or for that new technology. A hackathon is one way to explore new worlds.A hackathon is a context where it’s ok to break things without the expectation of creating any final output – but this hackathon had all of the ingredients for creatives to hack something new together.

Teaming up with R/GA’s Chatbot Authority Brad Jacobson and software engineer Sam Royston, we created a Rap Battle Bot. Training the Rap Battle Bot on thousands of lines of lyrics compiled across decades of rap allowed it to generate entirely new lines of poetry. Leveraging Reply.AI we created a chat interface on Facebook, so people can battle for title of best rapper, alive, dead, or digital. We ended the night with a live demo – a freestyle throwdown between R/GA's CTO and the Rap Battle Bot, leaving the crowd asking for an encore.

Team:
Sam Brewton - Rap Battle Experience Designer
Brad Jacobson - Strategist & Resident Chatbot Authority
Sam Royston - Machine Learning Engineer
Michael Hirsch - Data Scientist - Machine Learning

Photos by Annabel Ruddle
TBT November 2016