Hi, do you offer proxies?
Yes, proxies are something we can enable for select customers. If your use case requires them, feel free to reach out at contact@autotab.com
Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
51–60 of 84 posts
Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
#52Been working in this space for almost 9 years and written a lot of scrappers and web automations for various clients, I am really excited to build something like this too. Are you guys hiring? Would love to chat.
We are hiring. Feel free to reach out at contact@autotab.com
Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
#53Super cool. Congrats & well done. Can I install a Chrome extension within this browser and automate some actions on it?
Thanks! We currently have to manually add Chrome extensions on our side, but plan on supporting users installing arbitrary extensions in the future. So far we’ve found that most apps offer web UIs with the same functionality as the extension and Autotab can just use those.
What extension would you like to automate?
Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
#54If I understand this correctly, it looks like the promise I saw in that 'Record Macro' button in my Excel toolbar in the 1990s might finally be coming to fruition in a wider and more capable sense! A pleasant surprise effect of the new AI situation if true. I noticed in another comment that you said some steps can be made 'optional' (e.g. clicking through a modal). In my ancient Excel macro adventure, what I learned…
Indeed! A little secret: Internally we call the skills/workflows in Autotab macros :)
Currently there is a bit of a learning curve for training Autotab to be really reliable in hard cases. We expect we’ll be able to decrease significantly in the next few months, as we get models to do more of the thinking about how to best codify a given task solution/workflow. As an intuition pump for why we expect such rapid progress: in the scenario you described you’d just have a model write the VBA code for you.
Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
#55Really exciting to see this approach to automation and intent specification! We’ve been working with similar challenges at Origins AI, where we focus on deep tech solutions. I can’t overstate how much having a robust system for breaking down tasks and iterating on them has helped us. For one of our recent projects, we had to integrate complex workflows with third-party systems, and it was clear that reliability came…
Agree on the tradeoff between ability to handle novel situations and speed/cost. Autotab uses a “ladder of compute” system that escalates to the minimal level of compute required to solve a given subtask. I wrote a longer comment about this on another thread
Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
#56Is Autotab able to scrape data from multiple websites with different structures and combine this data into structured data in one CSV or JSON file? Example: scrape interest rates offered on savings accounts from multiple bank websites and extract the name of the bank, bank logo, product name and interest rate for each account and run this saved query on a regular schedule (daily, weekly etc)?
Assuming the bank’s websites look totally different from one another, you’d need open ended exploration to data extraction. We’ve focused more on reliability for repetitive tasks over flexibility for open ended tasks historically, but models are getting good enough that this tradeoff is diminishing. Expect updates from us on this front soon.
You can schedule skills in Autotab to run at arbitrary frequency.
Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
#57Have you considered how to handle mobile verification codes, graphic verification codes, and "proving you are not a robot" verification methods?
Quoting my cofounder from another thread:
For 2FA, different users take different approaches. Everything from teaching Autotab to pull auth codes from their email, to setting intervention requests at the top of their skills, to enterprise integrations that we support with SSO and dedicated machine accounts.
Autotab also has the ability to securely sync session data from your local app to cloud instances. This usually removes the need for doing 2FA again for sites with “remember this device” functionality.
We can enable captcha solving for select customers, but don’t allow that in the public app to prevent abuse.
Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
#58Very neat in theory but I'm failing to find any technical details. Which layer is the automation happening? Inside using Dev tools? Multiple? What is the self-healing mechanic? I'm guessing invoking an LLM to find what happened and fix it? I guess what I'm wondering is. Is this some sort of hybrid between computer use and Dev tools usage?
Autotab is definitely a hybrid approach, because when it comes to deciding where on the page to take an action, Autotab has to be fast & cheap (humans are both of those) while also being robust to changes. The solution we use is a "ladder of compute" where Autotab uses everything from really fast heuristics and local models up to the biggest frontier models, depending on how difficult the task is. For instance, if Au…
So no computer use (pixel-level understanding).
That's disappointing as the devtools approach always has limitations.
Kura agents, Runner H, and scrapybara will all end up more reliable than you.
Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
#59MacBook Pro m3 max; latest macos version:
Autotab has exited due to multiple fatal errors. Please contact support for assistance: contact@autotab.com.
Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
#60This is awesome! What is your most common use case? Have you thought of competing with https://scribehow.com/ in the documentation space?
Thanks! Our most common use cases are repetitive tasks people have at work, think updating Hubspot with analytics data from an internal tool or reconciling payments between an invoicing system, a payment system and a CRM. Haven’t done a lot with Scribe-like documentation cases. Given the pace at which this technology is developing we’re focused on making Autotab really good at the most economically valuable tasks.
How on earth does this help with reconciling payments? Can Autotab also recognize "this transaction belongs to this invoice" or does it just copy and paste all transaction and invoice data into a spreadsheet for manual reconciliation?