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Ask HN: What are the challenges of building a personal assistant like Siri?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the challenges of building a personal assistant like Siri?

#33

Post by NhanH »

awinter-py wrote: post #25
pjc50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't start by asking around on HN. Generally people aren't Elon Musk. Even he probably isn't Elon Musk all of the time.

A young composer met mozart and said 'I want to write a symphony, where do I start?'. Mozart spins him a story about starting with short pieces, then apprenticing to a serious composer, mastering the different instruments and gradually working up to it. The young composer is surprised. 'You didn't do all that'. 'Ah,' says mozart, 'but I didn't ask anybody how'.

I used to think that all the "geniuses" didn't ask anyone on how to do things at all, and just go for it. Turned out that they do, and luckily for us, in the internet age we have history.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...

Re: Ask HN: What are the challenges of building a personal assistant like Siri?

#34

Post by rburhum »

skewart wrote: post #11

Most of the comments here are pretty discouraging, which is reasonable. It sounds like an insanely ambitious project for a single non-expert to take on. But I completely disagree. You should go for it. Even if you never really get it to work you'll most likely learn a ton along the way. And if you even halfway pull it off it would make an epic "Show HN". Also, a lot of the required technologies are advancing at an in…

I second this encouragement strongly. Some of my favorite open source projects started with people telling the author "don't be stupid, why would you try to build [x] when there is [y] and you definitely don't understand the challenges of this topic". Linux, Leaflet, the geojson spec and several other projects started exactly like this - somebody excited to learn/build something challenging.

Re: Ask HN: What are the challenges of building a personal assistant like Siri?

#35

Post by galistoca »

In this specific case, I would start by trying to come up with an idea for a solution to an existing problem instead of trying to build a solution looking for a problem. Trying to build just another Siri will be wasting your time because you're just one person competing with pretty much all the big tech companies, whereas if you try to build a useful tech for a specific use case and people like it, then you can build your platform on top of it. I've never seen any small startup succeed by trying to build an ambitious "platform" from scratch. Most successful platform companies started out as small application providers and went from there. Some people are encouraging you to do it because that's how you learn things, but I would rather make something people like AND learn something new at the same time, instead of spending the same amount of time working on something that will never see the light of the day.

Re: Ask HN: What are the challenges of building a personal assistant like Siri?

#36

Post by awinter-py »

pjc50 wrote: post #20
gamerDude wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your fake quote sounds a bit like what Elon Musk might've said when he started SpaceX.

He didn't start by asking around on HN. Generally people aren't Elon Musk. Even he probably isn't Elon Musk all of the time.

justine musk (the ex) has an opinion about this

https://www.quora.com/Will-I-become-a-billionaire-if-I-am-de...

Re: Ask HN: What are the challenges of building a personal assistant like Siri?

#37

Post by bpyne »

Take a few minutes to discern your motivation.

If you're motivated by learning, you'll certainly do so. You'll probably learn about topics you hadn't considered learning about. Start small and build incrementally. Be patient, you're in for a lot of reading.

If you're motivated by profit, i.e. starting a company, then you need to be strategic. The Big Guys - Apple, Google, MS, etc. - are mostly looking at "general purpose" assistants. Keep in mind that they're putting massive effort into these assistants because the technology will become a central part of products like automobiles.

Perhaps you can find a niche market they're missing so that you can target your research and coding efforts.

As others said, pick a small, focused goal in building an assistant and add goals as you succeed.

Re: Ask HN: What are the challenges of building a personal assistant like Siri?

#38

Post by superice »

At my company we did it reasonably well, we just released our product to the market. We do have the advantage of having an app-based model, which means that every app the user installs on our product improves the speech recognition and the amount of actions installed.

Getting started is not that hard, getting good is. It's a hard problem to parse speech correctly, take numbers for example: Nineteen-Eightyfour can be parsed as 19 and 84, or as 1948, or as 9 10 80 4. There are challenges, certainly, but creating a simple program with things like wit.ai is do-able. Prepare to write a lot of speech parsing logic, and implement every piece of functionality by hand. Magic as Siri, Google Now, and Cortana may seem, most of it is just hardcoded responses and actions. That need not be a problem, but I can promise you, smart assistants will lose a lot of their magic once your realize it's just a bunch of responses and actions hard coded.

Anyway, I don't want to discourage you from trying, because it's really interesting to try and see what challenges you're going to encounter. The getting started pack for speech recognition is mostly wit.ai, or the Google STT engine. Keep in mind: none of the big companies are doing everything from scratch. Sure, Google has their own speech recognition, but recognizing the trigger phrase (jargon for 'OK Google', or 'Hey Siri') is outsourced. Every piece of software that has such a trigger uses the same library. Remember: using libraries is not cheating, it's just focusing on your core task, which is writing the parsing and actions.

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