By the end of October 2020 the French Government put in place a second general lockdown due to a recrudescence of the COVID-19 epidemic. This was completely reasonable, probably predictable, and for us basically meant no social interactions for at least 1 month and a half. This was when a friend of mine thought that creating a webradio between us friends could be a good way of fighting the (necessary) physical distancing while keeping us in touch and doing something fun all together. And this has definitely being an AMAZING idea!  So he set up everything and the adventure of Radio Lockdown began! Disclaimer: all was done in Italian, as we were an “all-spaghettis” group of expats living in Paris.

Each episode had different sections, and one of these sections was the “Auto-Horoscope”, the first of my contributions to the project. I basically created a database selecting funny jokes, sentences, aphorisms and the like that I found on the internet, together with ridiculous descriptions of the different zodiac signs, and then I created a very simple python script that, at each time, randomly selected some of those sentences and used them to fill a general template text, therefore creating each time a different funny horoscope in the form of a long string. 

After that I used gTTS (google text-to-speech) python package to convert this silly string into synthetic speech, so that we could stream it. In case you want to hear some examples of those Auto-Horoscopes, you can find most of them in Radio Lockdown’s YouTube channel! just remember (1) they were all done in Italian and (2) they are really stupid XD