HQTriviaMaster

A neat little macOS program to scan and answer HQ Trivia questions.

I don't really have time to maintain this project right now, so consider this program as-is.

Minimum macOS Version: 10.12

Setup

OCR

1. Install Tesseract OCR and ImageMagick (or in Terminal with brew install tesseract imagemagick or sudo port install tesseract imagemagick).

   HQTriviaMaster will warn at startup if any of these files are missing.

   Note: This step may require System Integrity Protection to be disabled.

2. Install the pods. This can be done using CocoaPod's Mac App.

   Note: If using Terminal, make sure you cd into HQTriviaMaster's directory first.

3. Visit Custom Search Engine to create a Custom Google Search Engine (CSE). Record the API Key and Search Engine ID.

   You can obtain an API Key by visiting this link.

   Note: Google Developers provides an excellent tutorial on setting up a CSE and obtaining an API Key.

   Note: You MUST activate your CSE after setting it up or HQTriviaMaster will not work. A link will be given to you for activation.

4. Open HQTriviaMaster by opening HQTriviaMaster.xcworkspace. It will have a white icon.

5. When running HQTriviaMaster for the first time, you will be prompted for the CSE API Key and Search Engine ID. You can change these at anytime by pressing ⌘, or going to HQTriviaMaster > Preferences.

   Note: You can add as many API Keys as you'd like. Simply click Add Key while editing CSE information within HQTriviaMaster.

Web Socket

1. Follow instructions here for iOS, or here for Android to set up mitmproxy.

   Note: On iOS, make sure to "trust" the mitmproxy certificate by opening Settings, and going to General > About > Certificate Trust Settings.

2. Open the HQ Trivia app on your phone while running mitmproxy.

3. In mitmproxy, click on https://api-quiz.hype.space/users/me.

• Copy and paste your token from the Authorization header into any text processor. It should start with Bearer.
• Click on Response, scroll down to find your user id. Write it down somewhere.

4. Add your user id and token to the HQTriviaMaster preferences.

5. Make sure you remove the proxy from your phone.

   Note: I'm not sure how often the token expires. If the web socket feature stops working for you, try repeating these steps to get a new token.

Usage

OCR

1. Open QuickTime or your favorite screen recording software and begin displaying your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch on screen.
2. Click on the "Define Boundary" button to highlight the area where questions will be appearing.
3. Click on the "Start Scanning" button. HQTriviaMaster will automatically scan the defined boundary for any HQ Tivia questions.
4. Sit back, relax, and let the program answer the questions for you!

Web Socket

1. Open HQTrivia master and make sure you are on the "Web Socket" mode.
2. Wait for the game to begin broadcasting.
3. That's it.
4. Seriously, thats it. Awesome, right?

FAQ

HQTriviaMaster won't build!

Ensure that you've installed the Pods (Step 2 under Setup) and that you've opened the project properly (Setup 4 under Setup)

The app isn't scanning any of the questions!

Tesseract is a finicky thing built about 30 years ago. The best guidance is to make sure the boundary fully goes over the question and answers with some padding on all 4 sides. You can also try increasing/decreasing the window size.

I've defined a boundary and HQTriviaMaster is scanning the questions, but I'm not getting any results!

This means your CSE is returning no data to the app. Please ensure your CSE is activated and that it is searching the web (you may need to add https://www.google.com under "Sites to Search").

I'm getting results, but they're completely wrong or very innacurate!

The accuracy can depend on a number of things, including but not limited to: how HQ formats the question, the type of question, the sites you've included in your CSE for searching, and Tesseract's scan of the question. HQTriviaMaster attempts to do its best at determining the type of question being asked, and formatting search strings based on that information. We are currently working on better question analysis to further improve accuracy.

I have some other feedback!

Please use the "Issue" tab above (or follow this link) and submit your issue. Always remember to include a copy of the full log Xcode prints to its console. If the issue is UI related, please also include a screenshot or video of the issue.

Note: Your issue may already be present. If that's the case, don't open another issue, but rather add your information to the already opened issue

To Do

• [ ] Improve accuracy (only 80% success rate right now).
• [ ] Add a way to answer a large amount of questions at once to test the program's accuracy.
• [x] Connect to the HQ Trivia web socket to get the questions. This would eliminate the need to OCR.
• [ ] Integrate an AI learning system to improve accuracy.
• [ ] Make the UI sexier.

Contributers

Daniel Smith (owner), Michael Schloss.

Also thanks to Gordon Jacobs for letting me bounce ideas off him while working on the web socket feature.

License

GNU GPL v3 License