Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta

What would be a business use-case? For example, we heavily use Slack for ops notifications (PagerDuty, Datadog, Opbeat), is the hope that companies will adopt Facebook messenger like companies adopt Slack?

Thanks for the insight.

Re: Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta

#5

Post by fizzbatter » Tue, Apr 12, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

Man, i really love wit.ai, one of the coolest projects i've worked with. Unfortunately, these days i'm becoming jaded to X as a Service. Things like hosting or databases as a service are quantifiable, i have an idea of how much effort it takes me to migrate away... but AI? Especially the cool AI flavored NLP that wit.ai offers - it's just too hard to migrate away from for me.

With that said, i understand how hard doing this in a home baked way could be. I think i just won't be happy until we have repositories of standardized ai training sets or baked results (forgive any pseudo terms). It just feels like these days, using awesome AI services means cementing yourself into the service, and making their service stronger as you increase their datasets and training.

As much as i really do love wit.ai, i just don't want to use these types of services unless my backs against a wall.

Re: Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta

#6

Post by ar7hur » Tue, Apr 12, 2016, 9:51 PM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #4

What would be a business use-case? For example, we heavily use Slack for ops notifications (PagerDuty, Datadog, Opbeat), is the hope that companies will adopt Facebook messenger like companies adopt Slack? Thanks for the insight.

You can use Bot Engine to build a Slack bot too, it's not tied to Messenger in any way, there is a HTTPS API.

Use cases on Messenger will probably be more around customer care or entertainment, news, etc.

Re: Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta

#7

Post by blandinw » Tue, Apr 12, 2016, 10:11 PM UTC

fizzbatter wrote: post #5

Man, i really love wit.ai, one of the coolest projects i've worked with. Unfortunately, these days i'm becoming jaded to X as a Service. Things like hosting or databases as a service are quantifiable, i have an idea of how much effort it takes me to migrate away... but AI? Especially the cool AI flavored NLP that wit.ai offers - it's just too hard to migrate away from for me. With that said, i understand how hard doi…

(cofounder of Wit.ai here) Thanks for your kind words :) I understand your concerns, here is my take.

X as a service allows you to get X with a lot less efforts. It allows you to understand the problem and your needs by getting started quickly. Over time, if X as a service saved you enough time and you become successful, you can choose to develop an expertise in X and cut the dependency.

Wit is also about building a community of developers and advancing the state of the art of NLP in apps. Once the bot engine matures a bit, we'll be focusing again on the community aspect of Wit and hopefully advance the field enough so that efforts like the standardization you mentioned are started.

Re: Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta

#8

Post by mwcampbell » Tue, Apr 12, 2016, 10:23 PM UTC

How can users communicate with a Bot Engine bot? Since wit.ai is part of Facebook, I naturally wonder if these bots will be locked into the Facebook platform.

Re: Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta

#9

Post by blandinw » Tue, Apr 12, 2016, 10:25 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #8

How can users communicate with a Bot Engine bot? Since wit.ai is part of Facebook, I naturally wonder if these bots will be locked into the Facebook platform.

Bot Engine is not tied to the Facebook platform. It exposes an HTTPS API that you can use from anywhere. Slack, the command-line, Messenger, a VR app, etc. We don't make assumptions on your platform.

https://wit.ai/docs/http/20160330#converse-link

Re: Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta

#10

Post by petr_tik » Tue, Apr 12, 2016, 10:37 PM UTC

ar7hur wrote: post #3

Hi everyone! I'm one of the cofounders. This is an early beta of our Bot Engine. We would love to get the community's feedback. Thanks!

Hey Ar7hur, Awesome Bot Engine - thanks. 2 questions, if I can: 1. How much of an inspiration did the Telegram bot API make on your dev team? 2. What's the NLP back-end for it and what are your plans for duckling? I forked it a while ago and was going to add some languages I know - would that be useful?

Thanks for an awesome product!