How I Built Spotify Alternative for Google Home

Azimjon Pulatov — Sun, 02 May 2021 12:49:11 +0000

It was Sunday night. Hackathon results were about to be announced and when I heard my team's name, I jumped out of my chair, I was thrilled. To add more excitement, I asked my Google Home to play "We Are The Champions" and to my surprise, it played totally different song. I could be disappointed but instead, I was inspired to know what I was building next.

Why did it play a different song? Because choosing songs is only available to Spotify Premium subscribers. Instead of subscribing, I decided to build an alternative myself.

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From the day I got my Google Home, I was wondering how to program it to do things I want. The first and easiest option was IFTTT. After connecting my Google Account, I was able to make simple applets that allowed to make Google Assistant say things back when certain questions were asked and bind it to actions like making a web request.

IFTTT wasn't quite what I was looking for, because it couldn't perform tasks like playing audio or programmatically generate a response. Then I discovered Google Actions. When I saw its capabilities, I realized - this is the way.

The first thing I needed to set up for the application was a webhook. So whenever the application gets invoked, Google Action makes a request to the webhook. One way to provide a publicly available URL for the webhook would be to deploy the application somewhere. Instead, for the development, I used JPRQ, a Ngrok Alternative for exposing a local webserver. You can read about how I built it.

How I built Ngrok Alternative

Azimjon Pulatov ・ Jul 9 '20

#python #go #sideprojects #javascript

After setting up the webhook, my local server was receiving anything I say to Google Assistant after the application was invoked. I could easily send a media response - a playable URL, and the assistant would play it. Great!

The best tutorial I could find on Google Actions is Behind the Actions, it helped me to understand basic building blocks like Scenes, Types, and Intents.

The next part is searching for songs. I first looked into available APIs provided by Deezer, Sound Cloud, and Apple Music. But none of them provided the full song, only the partial content. Then I decided to write a simple crawler to search songs from z1.fm. I thought about copyright issues, so I decided to keep MusicSpider to myself and not publish it for others.

Source code for MusicSpider is available on Github, both the web application built using Flask and the crawler for searching for songs.

To share my learnings, I gave a talk about "Programmable Google Assistant" where I also shared some of my other applications I built for Google Assistant.

Happy building,

Cheers

How I built Ngrok Alternative

Azimjon Pulatov — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 23:12:32 +0000

Here's a quick intro of what I built

Ngrok is a fantastic tool that helps developers to expose their localhost to the Internet with minimal effort. One day I was going to share a local project with a client without deploying it somewhere. But this time I needed to expose 2 ports: one running frontend and the other backend of the project, I found out that the ngrok's free plan only allows one tunnel at a time. Later that day, I also found out that there's a 40-requests/minute limit.

Bam! An idea.
What if I build an alternative instead of paying $5/mo.?
That's what developers do, right? I also had the idea of making it open-source.

It's time to plan.
There are obviously 3 parts:

a developer with a command-line tool (cli)
a proxy server
a client with a browser.

I was sure there had to be at least those steps to make it work:

a developer connects to the server via a cli with a port number: jprq 8000
the server responds with an assigned domain. amazing-coder.jprq.live
a client opens the domain in a browser: https://amazing-coder.jprq.live
the server receives the request and sends it to the cli.
the cli makes the request to localhost at the given port and sends the response to the server.
the server responds back to the client with the response it received from the cli.

Here's a chart to help you picture those steps.

The cli and the server needs to make back and forth communication. A carefully managed TCP Sockets would do a great job but would take a long time to implement.
I decided to use and used the WebSocket Protocol. As you might know, WebSocket is a hop-by-hop protocol and sadly, my ngrok alternative now can't support Polling and HTTP streaming (because they never end or last too long).

The command-line tool is written in Python and published to PyPy. Currently implementing the command-line in javascript to publish in npm just for fun. And the server-side is in Golang. I think it was the best decision to choose golang because of its easy data sharing between goroutines and learned about leaking goroutines the hard way. I now have a good understanding of memory leaks because of this project.

Another small but impactful mistake I made during implementing the client-server communication was using JSON. I realized it only after adding a feature for handling files. With JSON one can only serialize strings. To turn file contents, bytes into a string, I needed to Base64 them. It turns out to be CPU intensive process. It's better to use BSON, I believe.

The project is open-source and waiting for your contribution. Take some time to visit the GitHub repo at github.com/azimjohn/jprq

Keep building,
Cheers.

Forem: Azimjon Pulatov

How I Built Spotify Alternative for Google Home

How I built Ngrok Alternative

Azimjon Pulatov ・ Jul 9 '20

How I built Ngrok Alternative