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Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

wit.ai

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Re: Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

#52

Post by hackula1 »

tonydiv wrote: post #40

This looks neat, I will definitely keep it in mind. I would be weary of using the Github Octocat mascot though. I believe Octocat is protected under copyright.

The landing page looks like a minefield of legal issues. Marketing everything explicitly with the references to Siri is asking for a law suit from Apple.

Re: Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

#53

Post by ragebol »

ar7hur wrote: post #35
ragebol wrote: post #29

Interesting! Nothing happened after I registered with my Github account though using Opera. I also wonder how this compares to http://www.maluuba.com/ ?

> how this compares to http://www.maluuba.com Wit is 100% open and flexible, you can create any intent you need for your app, you're not limited to a static set of domains/actions. EDIT: @ragebol we are very interested in ROS and robotics, don't hesitate to get in touch with me arthur at wit dot ai. In the future we would like to provide an off-the-shelf human/robot communication module for developers.

For the robot I'm working on, we're using http://wiki.ros.org/wire to make probabilistic world models. When the API would not only return a confidence score for one possible interpretation, it would be interesting to get multiple interpretations with varying confidence scores, so you can somehow determine one that makes the most sense given your world model.

Re: Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

#54

Post by chrislomax »

Nice concept, I just came back on here to let you know that I don't know what is happening on that page but I left it open about 45 minutes ago and noticed my fan kicked in a lot. It was that page I left open. Ended up taking 25% CPU, you didn't work on the iTunes software did you??

Only messing, it was taking a lot of CPU though.

Re: Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

#55

Post by ar7hur »

npalli wrote: post #50

It was so confusing figuring out what this service is supposed to do. Had to look up the documentation. In summary, from what I can gather 1. It doesn’t do any speech recognition (speech -> text), so not sure why they put Siri in the title. It is also not clear how they can ‘hijack’ the text from Siri to do this analysis. The ASR engines they talk about (CMU, OpenEars) have pretty horrible accuracy (compared to Siri…

> 1. It doesn’t do any speech recognition (speech -> text), so not sure why they put Siri in the title. It is also not clear how they can ‘hijack’ the text from Siri to do this analysis. The ASR engines they talk about (CMU, OpenEars) have pretty horrible accuracy (compared to Siri or google voice).

Currently most Wit users use Google or Nuance with great success. You can even use Android's offline speech rec.

That being said, CMU and OpenEars work well, as long as you provide them with good language models (which you can't do if you hack a quick project). Our plan is for Wit to automatically generate the right language models from your instance configuration.

> 2. Looks like they do some form of text normalization/correction, again not clear how they do it. 3. The actual service they provide is a form of named entity recognition (confusing named intent which clashes with the android intent mechanism in their examples).

We abstract the full NLP stack for the developer. How we do it is not really what matters to our developers, as long as it works :) Actually we use a combination of many different NLP and machine learning techniques.

> 4. Also they let you define your own entities to match. You can train them using a drop –down menu. Not sure how you can train hundreds of examples using point and click.

You don't need to train hundreds of examples. Plus, our users are not NLP/ML experts and they prefer a graphical UI. But that's true it could be still more efficient, we have good features in the roadmap for that :)

> This different from alchemy (or many others) because this is open source(?) http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/features/entity-extractio....

Alchemy is great as a set of NLP tools, some of them quite academical, but it's not designed from scratch to solve the problem we're trying to solve: enable the masses of developers to easily add a natural language interface to their app.

Re: Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

#57

Post by blandinw »

chrislomax wrote: post #54

Nice concept, I just came back on here to let you know that I don't know what is happening on that page but I left it open about 45 minutes ago and noticed my fan kicked in a lot. It was that page I left open. Ended up taking 25% CPU, you didn't work on the iTunes software did you?? Only messing, it was taking a lot of CPU though.

Haha, sorry about that.. I guess we are better at Clojure than Angular.js!

Working on a fix now.

Re: Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

#58

Post by endlessvoid94 »

ar7hur wrote: post #48
endlessvoid94 wrote: post #45

This is amazingly timely for me, I've been building my own version of jarvis using speakeasy-nlp (a node NLP library) and Chrome's builtin support for HTML5 webkitSpeechRecognition: https://github.com/dpaola2/jarvis (work in progress) I absolutely would love a better NLP api. Please let me in!

Jarvis-like systems are a great use case. You should be able to sign up now.

You rock

Re: Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

#59

Post by skram »

ar7hur wrote: post #35
ragebol wrote: post #29

Interesting! Nothing happened after I registered with my Github account though using Opera. I also wonder how this compares to http://www.maluuba.com/ ?

> how this compares to http://www.maluuba.com Wit is 100% open and flexible, you can create any intent you need for your app, you're not limited to a static set of domains/actions. EDIT: @ragebol we are very interested in ROS and robotics, don't hesitate to get in touch with me arthur at wit dot ai. In the future we would like to provide an off-the-shelf human/robot communication module for developers.

How "open" is Wit? Open source or open APIs allowing users to modify your algorithms/training data? I assume there would be a significant cost to being able to run our own instance of Wit on-premise, right?

I applied for alpha access using the github username "marks"

Re: Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

#60

Post by aquark »

npalli wrote: post #50

It was so confusing figuring out what this service is supposed to do. Had to look up the documentation. In summary, from what I can gather 1. It doesn’t do any speech recognition (speech -> text), so not sure why they put Siri in the title. It is also not clear how they can ‘hijack’ the text from Siri to do this analysis. The ASR engines they talk about (CMU, OpenEars) have pretty horrible accuracy (compared to Siri…

You could SiriProxy (https://github.com/plamoni/SiriProxy) as input to this to handle to speech-to-text part

I'm running this at home and it works great for adding custom actions to Siri

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