The first question I asked is current temperature, and it kept to feed me some show reservation schedule and yelp reviews.
This is a bit retarded.
Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
71–80 of 90 posts
Re: Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
#72Mind if I ask how you go about the natural language processsing? Is it using something such as Wit.ai?
Of course. I thought about using wit.ai a few months ago, but I found a lot of issues in how they approach parsing and classification. Specifically, training it is a very manual process, and customization and tweaking is very hard.
I've built my own API which can do entity and language parsing. It relies on utilizing word embeddings (such as those described here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4546.pdf).
Re: Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
#73The first question I asked is current temperature, and it kept to feed me some show reservation schedule and yelp reviews. This is a bit retarded.
@bitcuration - thanks for trying it out :)
As the welcome page mentions, it currently only answers queries around restaurant recommendations/reservations, and the logistics around them - reviews/times/menus. It would be great if you tried that out. As the system becomes more intelligent and location aware, I'm hoping it will get to answering broader questions such as yours.
Re: Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
#74Mind if I ask how you go about the natural language processsing? Is it using something such as Wit.ai?
Of course. I thought about using wit.ai a few months ago, but I found a lot of issues in how they approach parsing and classification. Specifically, training it is a very manual process, and customization and tweaking is very hard. I've built my own API which can do entity and language parsing. It relies on utilizing word embeddings (such as those described here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4546.pdf ).
Thank you. Very interesting!
Re: Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The language and entity recognition are using custom stuff that isn't part of any standard libs. For instance, in a query like "whats a good happy hour place in the mission?" - nothing is capitalized and all of the standard libs out there can't deal with it. For building blocks - it's a combination - mixture of word2vec for feature vectors, and some parts of spaCy (though still experimental).
I'm unsure of what you mean by stating that none of the standard libs include what you need. Could you expand on this point? Using your example, why couldn't you use a standard parts of speech tagger, even on a poorly-punctuated sentence? Also could you expand on the NLP techniques you are actually using? How are you embedding the words/phrases/sentences into the vector space? Are you doing compositional embedding (u…
@crazypro - The question to ask for me was - "what is the most important phrase and what does it mean?" In the example, "happy hour" and "mission" are the two things I need. Using some sort of knowledge base is hard because I can't predict every query the user may throw at me, and there will always be issues with disambiguation. For locations, I could have a gazetteer which would make life easier.
What I meant was that existing libs, in my limited experience, can't do entity recognition (even those that use classifier based chunkers) unless you've got a good dataset of similar conversations. Which I don't yet. So my option was to build something that would take an arbitrary sentence and do so while only having limited training. Does that make sense?
I'm utilizing word/phrase vectors - haven't moved to sentence vectors yet. And they are in the same space. I'm not entirely sure what compositional embedding entails, so presumably I'm not doing that. I would however love to chat offline and get more insight from you on it.
Re: Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
#76Alright so the first hiccup I rant into was when you sent me a postscript telling me that using WhatsApp or Facebook messenger is a better experience. Well, I wanted better so I started going down that path. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to do that. Naturally, I asked you. http://cl.ly/image/3k2U1c0i372d And that didn’t work. Then I tried clicking on Messenger link on your site. http://cl.ly/image/0L1L1T3w0F1P But…
@kevin - Thanks for the detailed feedback! Appreciate it. The sign up flow messaging could definitely use more work and I'll be sure to incorporate your feedback into it. One fix would be to be to simply ask for the email again as opposed to restarting the whole flow. I just debugged what happened with the double signup BTW. Basically, an issue with FB Messenger is that not everyone associates their phone number with…
Use the email address. Send me a link to verify to connect the two.
Re: Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
#77Hard to beat the on-boarding experience—just input your number and get going. I like the thought that went into making it as simple as possible.
The response times seem instantaneous, which given what's going on under the hood, probably wasn't the easiest to accomplish. The speed went a long way to keep me engaged and trying new queries. What tech stack does any given query hit and what pieces needed the most focus to keep request latency low?
My major question is, when would I use this over Siri?
Siri is usually good enough for the same types of queries I tried. Good enough and faster access to Siri will probably make my use of something like Myra limited in current form.
For a more concrete example, if I am in the Mission and I don't know what's good to eat, I'll hold down my home button on the iPhone and ask siri: "restaurants in the mission". From there it's easy to get into Yelp and then do all my further refinements and actions without needing to text or form any more natural language queries.
Now, if future functionality is in place that gets over that 'good enough' barrier, I think this is on to something.
Kudos.
Re: Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
#78Hard to beat the on-boarding experience—just input your number and get going. I like the thought that went into making it as simple as possible. The response times seem instantaneous, which given what's going on under the hood, probably wasn't the easiest to accomplish. The speed went a long way to keep me engaged and trying new queries. What tech stack does any given query hit and what pieces needed the most focus t…
Thank you for trying it out! Let me try to answer your queries. No pun intended of course.
- Siri doesn't maintain conversational context. If you wanted to find a sushi place in SOMA, and the recommendation was too expensive, you could just say "show me something cheaper" to Myra. For Siri, you'd have to repeat saying "cheap sushi places in the mission" which (doesnt work today and) would show you a whole different set of results. You can also never ask Siri things like "Show me reviews for Foreign Cinema" and "get me a reservation there".
- Siri's not good at answering questions. If you ask it for happy hour places in the mission for instance, or the best outdoor date spot in SF - the results are simply not useful. Myra will not only recommend a place, but also things like when the happy hour time is, and why the japanese gardens in Golden Gate Park are a good outdoor date spot. More importantly, it will factor in things like open times and available reservations when showing you this data.
- Also, when you're having a group conversation with other people, when it's too noisy around you, or you have something private to say - text is always better.
Re: Tech stack - for every query, you are actually seeing live results (for instance, reservation data can't be cached). Doing the NL parts quickly was the most challenging piece so far. It's written in Python.
Hope this helps.
Re: Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great suggestion @donall. I'm already crawling the web for information and not just reviews, but the location database would be awesome. Is there a specific class of program you guys have for free data?
You can get free access to the API, capped at 10K requests per day. Hopefully that is enough to be useful at this initial stage! After that, I think pricing depends on your app. I think it is extremely favourable to small/new startups, but I am am engineer and not a sales guy, so I don't want to say anything that might be both specific and wrong... (I hope this isn't starting to sound like a bait and switch sales pit…
Thanks @donall. Will ping you offline.
Re: Show HN: Myra – AI based personal assistant you can text
#80Question for developers : Would you like to see a Myra API and if so, what kind of features would you want/what kind of app would you build with it?