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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

#61

Post by ar7hur »

skram wrote: post #59
ar7hur wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

> How "open" is Wit?

Openness is one of our core values. We're inspired by companies like GitHub.

- Regarding data, we encourage users to share their data, making “public” Wit instances free of charge (à la GitHub). We’re also working on standard formats for NLP/ML data (models, sets, etc).

- Regarding open-source, we plan to release our algorithms and infrastructure piecemeal (à la Prismatic). We’ll announce our open source plans in the near future.

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

#63

Post by ar7hur »

hackula1 wrote: post #52
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.

Fucking sue me :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6366912

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

#64

Post by ar7hur »

radley wrote: post #62

The pricing model doesn't scale realistically and would require a subscription service for users. An app with 1M+ installs could do 1M+ calls per day making this service $24k / month.

That's why at the bottom of the pricing page we encourage you to contact us if you have more than 1M calls per month.

Meanwhile you can decide to share your configuration data and get Wit for free (à la Github) :)

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

#65

Post by mikeash »

ar7hur wrote: post #21
MasterScrat wrote: post #12

That looks really interesting. You should make it clearer that you don't actually handle voice recognition. When I read: "Developers use Wit to easily build a voice interface for their app." I expect you to handle things from start to finish. Also, let me try it! It's frustrating because the UI looks like you can experiment but it's only an animated demo (or am I missing something??) In particular the mic logo is use…

> You should make it clearer that you don't actually handle voice recognition. You're right, we'll make it more clear on the landing page. A full out-of-the-box integration with some voice recognition engines (we love CMU Sphinx, open source) is in our roadmap. > Also, let me try it! We purposely didn't provide a "end-user" demo (something that would look like chatting with Siri) because we want to focus first on the…

Requiring an invite seems like such a high barrier to entry if you actually want people to sign up. I usually skip any such thing, because instant gratification is great, and who knows when the invite will come in and whether I'll still care once it does.

Seeing this message, I bit the bullet and requested an invite anyway, and have seen no action in the couple of hours since... thus validating my initial reluctance.

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

#66

Post by blandinw »

mikeash wrote: post #65
ar7hur wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should make it clearer that you don't actually handle voice recognition. You're right, we'll make it more clear on the landing page. A full out-of-the-box integration with some voice recognition engines (we love CMU Sphinx, open source) is in our roadmap. > Also, let me try it! We purposely didn't provide a "end-user" demo (something that would look like chatting with Siri) because we want to focus first on the…

Requiring an invite seems like such a high barrier to entry if you actually want people to sign up. I usually skip any such thing, because instant gratification is great, and who knows when the invite will come in and whether I'll still care once it does. Seeing this message, I bit the bullet and requested an invite anyway, and have seen no action in the couple of hours since... thus validating my initial reluctance.

I totally understand what you mean.

But as a bootstrapped startup, we have to make tradeoffs as our budget is limited. We have to accept invitations gradually today to keep our servers alive. We should be able to accept everybody within a few days at most. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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

#67

Post by mikeash »

blandinw wrote: post #66
mikeash wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring an invite seems like such a high barrier to entry if you actually want people to sign up. I usually skip any such thing, because instant gratification is great, and who knows when the invite will come in and whether I'll still care once it does. Seeing this message, I bit the bullet and requested an invite anyway, and have seen no action in the couple of hours since... thus validating my initial reluctance.

I totally understand what you mean. But as a bootstrapped startup, we have to make tradeoffs as our budget is limited. We have to accept invitations gradually today to keep our servers alive. We should be able to accept everybody within a few days at most. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I hadn't thought of the load. If it's there because you need to rate-limit users, then I completely understand. Would be ideal to take everyone instantly, but the world isn't always ideal.

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

#68

Post by lutusp »

The word "Siri" doesn't belong in the title or the article, unless a Trabant advertisement has the right to mention Mercedes-Benz in its promotional text. The project does a primitive kind of voice recognition, but it doesn't use Siri.

On this topic, I invite people to try out my non-prototype, non-project toy that uses Google's support for HTML5 speech recognition. It's pretty funny how wrong things go when you try to say something even a bit out of the ordinary:

http://arachnoid.com/speech_to_text

If I say, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country," an old teletype test sentence, the Google recognizer always nails it. If I say, "I hit an uncharted rock and my boat is being repaired," things go hilariously wrong, and every time differently.

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

#70

Post by ar7hur »

drakaal wrote: post #69

Sounds like they are trying to be this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko-r4gpM3Rc Except Stremor has a Query Language so you don't have to do anywhere near as much heavy lifting.

Hi Stremor! :)

Looks like you focus on search, summary, entity and sentiment extraction with a rule-based approach.

Wit's focus is to power human/machine interfaces, and our priority is to provide developers with a 100% configurable solution, with no prior assumption on their domain. And we don't believe in rules, we chose a machine learning approach.

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