An IBM employee has made a real-life Harry Potter sorting hat that runs on IBM Watson’s Natural Language Classifier. Ryan Anderson, a solutions architect who built the sorting hat for his two daughters, designed the hat to sort the individual wearing it based on how they describe themselves.
"I was thinking of fun projects and, coincidentally, I have a couple daughters and they are mad keen on Harry Potter - they've read the books like 5 times," Anderson told Tech Insider.
Watson’s Speech to Text feature allows people to talk with the hat, and the sorting hat also uses deep learning to further expand on keywords associated with the four houses (i.e. Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw). The hat also boasts animatronics -- its brows will furrow if you’re sorted as a Slytherin and the eyes will turn green for Gryffindor.
Those looking to be sorted can turn to Twitter, as an account promises to place users looking to be find out their Hogwarts house. The account — The Sorting Hat Bot (@SortingBot) — not only lets you know what house you are when you follow it, but it also delivers the news in the form of a rhyme. The Twitter account is a robot, so there isn't an actual person analyzing your account and coming up with rhymes. That said, the actual bot was created by Massachusetts-based Darius Kazemi.
