What is this?

Example Number Channel Output:

Making NumberChannel was designed as a learning experience so that I could gain the basic knowledge needed to make more complicated automated channels in the future. To do this, I broke down what I wanted the channel to do into it's basic steps.

Step 1: Generate the 10 digit number. 

I chose 10 digits because US telephone numbers have 10 digits and, to my ear, it sounded better than a 9 or 11 digit number. And 10 is a nice round number, besides.

Step 2: Generate the Text to Speech

This involved learning about how to use Googles TTS API, which was surprisingly easier than I thought.

Step 3: Put the audio all together.

So this was an eye opening aspect and, I think, one of the most powerful parts of this whole thing. I needed to put a jingle at the front and back of the TTS and, LO, there was a python library for that: PyDub. The cool thing about this is that if, in the future, I want to switch to human performed numbers, it will be trivial to stitch the pieces together using this same method.

Step 4: Generate the image.

This was the hardest part. The documentation for PIL is very difficult for beginners to understand.

Step 5: Combine the image and audio into an MP4

Literally the easiest part. FFMPEG for the win!

Step 6: Upload it to YouTube

This part was kinda tricky. The trickiness came, mostly, from figuring out the sweet spot in terms of upload frequency because there is a daily upload limit through the API. If there wasn't, I could upload a video every 43 seconds, even on that old Core 2 Duo. But it looks like uploading every half hour gives enough cooldown time for the API. You might even say the API gets a chance to REST. 

Taking what I learned doing this, I'm looking forward to experimenting more with automated YouTube Channels.