Web APIs for useRs: Getting data from websites, databases, and LLMs - Umair Durrani

Many websites and services provide APIs, and useRs can take advantage of them to get data, make database operations, and talk to Large Language Models (LLMs). The httr2 package, with its support for sequential and parallel requests, is a great tool for efficient API interactions. I will demonstrate its use through two real-world examples. First, I will introduce the frstore package, which I developed to interact with Google Firestore, a NoSQL database. While client libraries exist for Python and JavaScript, R users were left out—until now. frstore enables create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations using httr2, making it a powerful tool for R users working with Firestore.

The second example is a Shiny app designed to create an immersive storytelling experience. Users provide the first sentence of a children’s story, and the app uses httr2 to interact with multiple APIs. Cloudflare’s Workers Model API is used to send requests to text generation and image generation models. Moreover, Eleven Labs’ API converts text to speech for audiobook-like narration. These results are integrated in a quarto revealjs slide deck that yields a delightful, interactive storytime experience.

This talk is aimed at R users of all levels who want to expand their toolkit for web data access and API interactions. Whether you’re scraping data, working with APIs, or building interactive applications, this session will provide practical examples to enhance your R workflows.

There is a shiny app: https://umair.shinyapps.io/storytimegcp/
And a package: https://github.com/Presage-Group/frst...