
Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta - blandinw
https://wit.ai/blog/2016/04/12/bot-engine?hn
======
fizzbatter
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.

~~~
blandinw
(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.

~~~
tyre
Could you explain why it is in your best interest to do so? Unless your
community-based efforts are focused on "built on Wit", you would be actively
lowering the bar to entry.

From a company standpoint, the commoditization of the GP's comment is directly
counter to your incentives as a business.

~~~
blandinw
Not sure I correctly understand your question, but I'll give it a shot.

Today, Wit offers many advantages out-of-the-box so you don't have to setup
your own solution.

As NLP gets more commoditized (e.g. through open-source, open datasets), Wit
will have to provide even more value than today to stay relevant. Value can be
ease of use, accuracy, etc. That's how the field makes progress.

Regarding best interest, if you mean FB's best interest, FB wants more
intelligent bots in Messenger, VR, etc. It makes sense to provide the tools to
do so. Opening these tools also helps make them better (why is FB open-
sourcing React for example?)

If you mean the Wit team's best interest, we're always happy to provide better
tools to developers and innovate in AI / UX. That's why we started Wit after
all :-)

~~~
aapusaam
Will FB open source Bot Engine too for the betterment of NLP and communities
working around it?

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nl
I really like the "deliberate overfitting of stories to make them behave like
rules" approach. It's the kind of thing that sounds obvious as soon as you say
it, but only comes from deep immersion in the problem space.

I'm thinking of lots of other places I can use it too now - is there a name
for this approach yet?

~~~
ar7hur
Thanks Nick. No name yet, do you have a suggestion? Uberfitting? :)

~~~
mycl
It's called case-based reasoning ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-
based_reasoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-based_reasoning)).

------
ar7hur
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!

~~~
devty
hey ar7hur - excited about the release.

i've seen/heard that wit.ai likes to use clojure (lisp for AI programming? of
course!). was clojure used to power Bot Engine? if so, how did your team like
the experience?

~~~
blandinw
The team loves it. We're shipping features quickly and it integrates nicely
with all the FB infrastructure (via Java). And of course, once you taste REPL-
driven development.. you cannot go back :-)

~~~
devty
awesome!

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alainchabat
Hi! that's awesome! I started to play with it .

I was wondering if there is any way to have predefined stories? I'm sure there
is already a bunch of "weather" stories or "how are you" stories that must
come over and over. I don't want to spend much time on it

------
xumx
So far my experience have been terrible. Worse experience than the previous
version. It is difficult to understand how stories work. It doesn't fit well
with the Facebook messenger platform.

Lacks documentation and examples. There is no support for story branching,
conditional flows, or intents.

What is Merge supposed to do.. How is it possible for my server code to know
what to merge the entity into context, without knowing the intent.

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alainchabat
Hi, sorry to report a bug (or is it me missing anything?). I successfully
created the first story. However, the second story (basic, just text) keeps
failing. Wondering what I did wrong ?
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/32bly2hei8ehm1s/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/32bly2hei8ehm1s/Screenshot%202016-04-13%2020.14.48.png?dl=0)

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melvinmt
How can I test my own bot without using the API?

Basically looking for something like this:
[https://wit.ai/Francis88/Internet%20of%20Things/eval?_t=856&...](https://wit.ai/Francis88/Internet%20of%20Things/eval?_t=856&q=hello)

~~~
blandinw
We're actually working on it :-) The F8 rush took us a bit by surprise...
Shipping soon! [http://imgur.com/hjswrHT](http://imgur.com/hjswrHT)

~~~
phodo
Was it "rushed" because of Microsoft's bot announcement a couple of weeks ago?
(not expecting an answer... ) :)

~~~
blandinw
No, it was rushed because F8 was getting close, we're a small team and we had
ambitious goals in terms of features!

We had planned to release the Bot Engine at F8 long before MSFT's
announcement. If you ask me, F8 might have affected _their_ timing more than
the other way around ;-)

------
brandnewlow
Anyone want to build a bot with me? I'm playing around with this and it looks
really fun.

~~~
jeromekjerome
Love to collaborate ...

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kenpeltzer
With the Messenger platform being opened up today as well, are there currently
plans to provide some kind of boilerplate integration between the Messenger
api and the wit.ai HTTP api?

Been playing with the Bot Engine all day btw - great product so far :)

~~~
patapizza
(Wit.ai engineer here)

Thank you for the interest :-)

We haven't released any examples showing an integration with Messenger
Platform API. In the meantime, please refer to the Messenger Platform docs:
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-
platform/quic...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-
platform/quickstart)

If you have any feedback, please shoot!

------
nodesocket
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.

~~~
ar7hur
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.

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mwcampbell
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.

~~~
blandinw
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](https://wit.ai/docs/http/20160330#converse-link)

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dharma1
Does this work together with a speech recognition/TTS API from Wit? My use
case is a Unity3D VR app

