"Mansplaining” is the all-too-common phenomenon of “a man explaining something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner.” Send the Mansplainer app a picture and have it described back to you in the worst way possible, just for funsies.
If you ask any woman in tech, she’s probably had to deal with “mansplaining” at some point in her career – you know, when a dude tells you, a woman, something you already know in a way that implies you’re some sort of simpleton without an advanced degree in whatever STEM field you worked your ass off to earn. It’s a special kind of feeling when one is mansplained to, and women shouldn’t be the only ones privileged enough to experience it. That’s where Mansplainer comes in!
Using Clarifai’s visual recognition API with the Twilio API, Mansplainer is able to take whatever image you send it via text message and describe it to you in the most condescending way possible. If you haven’t had the distinct pleasure of being mansplained to before, here’s your chance – try it now!
WHY WE ❤ IT
While we absolutely despise mansplaining, we love an app that can poke fun at it. Check out the GitHub repo for source code!
HOW YOU DO IT
Mansplainer was brought to you by Henry Shen, Khalid Alnuaim, Dandan Lin, and Erin Williams, courtesy of the HackNY student hackathon. We caught up with Henry to talk about the team’s inspiration for the app.
Clarifai: What inspired your idea for Mansplainer?
Henry: I really enjoy hackathons and the culture that comes with them. I love using computer science to create solutions to problems that never existed in people’s lives. There was a similar idea on Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon where you talk to an app but then it interrupts you. We decided to extend on that idea by mansplaining your own photo back to you.
How did you build the app?
We used Clarifai, Twilio to handle the text messaging, the Flask python web framework, and the Wikimedia web search API. We also used food and caffeine, but we couldn’t deploy that on to the server.
What was the best part about working with the Clarifai API?
I didn’t specifically interact with the Clarifai API – someone in our group that used it before did. But they love it!
Thanks for sharing, Henry!
To learn more, check out our documentation and sign-up for a free Clarifai account to start using our API – all it takes is three lines of code to get up and running! We’re super excited to share all the cool things built by our developer community, so don’t forget to tweet @Clarifai to show us your apps.
And give the Mansplainer team some props in the comments below. Until next time!
