Wit
AI
natural language api
SHOW HN2013
321points
95comments
#28of 1,739 in 2013
Top 2%of 2013 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
12 positive, 25 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 15 critical, out of 54 comments about the project. Thread score -0.16.
Idea: 5 for, 5 againstDesign: 1 for, 6 againstDocs: 3 for, 1 againstPricing: 0 for, 1 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Interesting concept and timely for voice-driven apps
From 2 comments
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…
endlessvoid94 on HNThis looks really promising - can't wait to see where it is in a year with community additions.
veg on HN
Good developer tutorials and documentation
From 1 comment
Love you guys already. Thank you!
sally888 on HN
Objections
Confusing description; does not do speech recognition despite Siri in title
From 3 comments
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…
npalli on HNThat 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…
MasterScrat on HNThe 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…
lutusp on HN
Invite-only signup is a barrier
From 2 comments
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…
mikeash on HN> You can require an invite and try this in less than 5 minutes. Fair enough, but then you should make it clear: "Want to try it out? require an invite and try this in less than…
MasterScrat on HN
Animated page content is distracting
From 3 comments
Is there any way to view this page with the effects turned off? With all the text constantly appearing and disappearing, I haven't yet made it to the end of a sentence, and…
jasonkester on HNBetter, but it still seems to have lots of things happening on timers. So I still have things I'm trying to read disappearing out from under me. I imagine as the developer you…
jasonkester on HNThis "fade-in as you scroll" thing is annoying. Get-rid-of-it-right-now kind of annoying.
MasterScrat on HN
Per-call pricing may not scale
From 1 comment
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 /…
radley on HN
Requests
Clearer explanation of what the service does
From 2 comments
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…
MasterScrat on HNYour message isn't clear. AFAIK there is no official way to interact with Siri or Google voice rec. It seems like WIT will take the text that has already been translated from a…
fjabre on HN
Support for languages beyond English
From 2 comments
what about languages other then English ?
GuriK on HNJapanese, due to demands for translation and robotics.
vincvinc on HN
Ruby tutorial
From 2 comments
Great job on this. Are there any plans for Ruby or javascript tutorials, or am I being too optimistic?
sally888 on HNHere is a node.js tutorial: https://wit.ai/docs/nodejs-tutorial We'll release a Ruby tutorial soon!
ar7hur on HN
Open source release
From 2 comments
As a Service? Why not go open source?
illyism on HNHow "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…
skram on HN
Questions
How does it get text from Siri or voice recognition
From 2 comments
Your message isn't clear. AFAIK there is no official way to interact with Siri or Google voice rec. It seems like WIT will take the text that has already been translated from a…
fjabre on HNI like the concept a lot. I'm going to have to read more about it. One thing that I'm unclear about is if this does voice->text, or if the developer does that and Wit handles…
xauronx on HN
How does it compare to Alchemy, Ask Ziggy or Maluuba
From 3 comments
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…
npalli on HNHow does this compare and contrast to http://www.ask-ziggy.com/ ?
skram on HNInteresting! Nothing happened after I registered with my Github account though using Opera. I also wonder how this compares to http://www.maluuba.com/ ?
ragebol on HN
Alternatives named
Ask Ziggy
From 2 comments
How does this compare and contrast to http://www.ask-ziggy.com/ ?
skram on HNAt Ask Ziggy, we are also 100% self-service.
blazingfrog2 on HN
Maluuba
From 2 comments
Interesting! Nothing happened after I registered with my Github account though using Opera. I also wonder how this compares to http://www.maluuba.com/ ?
ragebol on HNAwesome! I made a wrapper around Maluuba for ROS before (https://github.com/yol/maluuba_ros) and maybe I get to a Wit-wrapper for ROS as well. With Maluuba, we can't make a…
ragebol on HN
AlchemyAPI
From 1 comment
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…
npalli on HN
Stremor
From 1 comment
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.
drakaal on HN