🎓 Generate your own commencement speeches with Markov chains and a dataset of some of the world's "best" commencement speeches.
After running this project, you might be able to deliver this pithy soundbite in your next speech:
The secret to success in start-ups, or any other collaboration, is to stick an old head on a motorcycle weaving his way down the hall, he passed a door – it was empty.
Or perhaps this wisdom nugget:
Think of your ancestors: Among them, for everybody here, among your ancestors and I even thought about running away from the old ones.
Here's another gem that I generated using this model:
Every athlete who enters the Olympic Games have taught us that we're all going to be the better conditions that primordial life began on this very, very well, in any arena, is improbable at best, irrelevant at worst.
And one of my favorites:
They listened to someone who makes nothing but flaming hot Cheetos.
Click this button to open a Workspace on FloydHub where you can generate your own "commencement speech style" sentences in a live JupyterLab environment. The commencement address dataset of ~300 famous speeches will be automatically attached and available in the Workspace.
The speech_maker notebook has three sections for you to try:
- Using the entire dataset
- Filtering to only the top ten schools by count of speeches given
- Filtering to one school at a time using a Jupyter widget extension
The commencement address dataset is a plaintext collection of some of the world's most famous commencement speeches. This repo contains a CSV with metadata for each speech (speaker name, school, and year).
The list of speeches originally started with NPR's The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever, a site I frequent often. Transcripts were available for many but not all of the speeches.
If you're in need of your daily dose of cliché, trope, and sentimentality, you can view the speeches here in a simple Gatsby.js site.