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Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app

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

#81

Post by _sh »

ar7hur wrote: post #55
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 b…

> How we do it is not really what matters to our developers, as long as it works :)

How you do it is most certainly what matters to developers, as soon as it doesn't work as expected :)

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

#82

Post by ar7hur »

_sh wrote: post #81
ar7hur wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> How we do it is not really what matters to our developers, as long as it works :) How you do it is most certainly what matters to developers, as soon as it doesn't work as expected :)

Fair enough.

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.

Practice is everything works but no one knows why.

Here, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why

:)

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

#83

Post by mynameisme »

illyism wrote: post #7

As a Service? Why not go open source?

Ignoring any open vs. closed source arguments, this kind of thing would work much better as library than some third party service. There's no way I'd make an application that depended on a third party service over the internet for basic UI interaction.

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

#84

Post by blazingfrog2 »

ar7hur wrote: post #79
skram wrote: post #56

How does this compare and contrast to http://www.ask-ziggy.com/ ?

We share the same vision that voice becomes the key human/machine interface, especially for the upcoming generation of wearable devices, home automation, etc. I don't know if Ask Ziggy is 100% self-service for the developers. That's a key requirement for us.

At Ask Ziggy, we are also 100% self-service.

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

#85

Post by X4 »

aquark wrote: post #60
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

I was initially thinking that this is just a SaaS2SaaS Wrapper around Google/Apple Speech recognition. Hey, tbh. wouldn't that be a clever way to market? hehe, that reminded me to SiriProxy.

But to give the authors their credit back, it's not what I guessed. It's much more a GUI around a complex toolset that would require you to dig deep into mudwater, bad docs etc. So, yes it makes life easier and sense to use this in your app. I have not evaluated the quality of their service yet, but it's a Startup, it's not going to stop improving (hopefully) :)

(Google/Apple are essentially powered by "Nuance", but with different qualities of training-data.)

More NLP/AI Startups and more colloboration on HN please!

2cents: I hope people don't sell to their first working protoype to the Google/Apple/Microsoft Empire, but try to get big on with friendly startup-colloboration and with the help of investors/angels.

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

#86

Post by StavrosK »

drakaal wrote: post #72
ar7hur wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, PleaseAPI is converting Natural Language to Database like structures/commands with no need to have a human come up with every way you could say something because the vocabulary is built in. Unlike Wit it also offers the option to use the API's that are already integrated or Bring Your Own Backend so that you can have a mix of info/responses from your own system, or leverage what is already there.

Where can I sign up for that?

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

#87

Post by StavrosK »

blazingfrog2 wrote: post #84
ar7hur wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We share the same vision that voice becomes the key human/machine interface, especially for the upcoming generation of wearable devices, home automation, etc. I don't know if Ask Ziggy is 100% self-service for the developers. That's a key requirement for us.

At Ask Ziggy, we are also 100% self-service.

Is there a pricing page?

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

#88

Post by mrosethompson »

lutusp wrote: post #68

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…

I also found it going very well or very, very badly.

For instance: "In most cases, before beginning to listen, the browser will ask permission to monitor your microphone."

Came out as: "In Las Cruces, f listen, permission to monitor your microphone."

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

#89

Post by blazingfrog2 »

StavrosK wrote: post #87
blazingfrog2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Ask Ziggy, we are also 100% self-service.

Is there a pricing page?

Not at this point. Feel free to sign up for the beta on our site and take it for a spin, I'll make sure to get you your credentials quickly. PS: by the way, big fan of historio.us...
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