Misnomers was a project created by my friend Dawson and I for HackKU 2021. The goal of our project was to create a easy-to-use, minimalist website and application programming interface (API) for generating unique fantastical character names using machine learning.
Unfortunately, the website is no longer being hosted on the internet. Apologies!
You can view the Misnomers website here. The API can also be called directly by sending a GET request to https://misnomers.herokuapp.com/api. The expected response is an array of JSON objects, similar to the following.
[{"name":"Anher"},{"name":"Uanne"},{"name":"Ildyn"},{"name":"Ysi"},{"name":"Hilyng"}]
It should be noted that the API can be slow at times, so please be patient with it.
Misnomers came to be after Dawson and I tried and failed to create a baby name generator using the same techniques Misnomers uses now. When looking at some of the potential "baby names", inspiration struck us! These names weren't for human babies, but children of our minds. These would be perfect names for Dungeons and Dragons characters! The rest is history.
The first step was to train the model which would serve names to the website. To do this, we used Keras to create a recurrent neural network (RNN). The code which does this is located in the model_train folder. After the model is trained, it is stored in the namegen-300.hdf5 file.
Misnomers is a Flask web app. The app (app.py) hosts an API which the web frontend calls upon to be served names from the model. It calls the API everytime the page is loaded so new, unique names are shown every time. The gen.py script provides a Model class which allows the web app to interface with the model and get names for the API.
Misnomers is hosted on Heroku. The requirements.txt file specifies what Python packages Heroku will need to download to deploy Misnomers. Procfile specifies that the gunicorn web server is to be used when hosting the app on Heroku.