
Show HN: Josh.ai, an AI for the home - alexcaps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7266YkROLYM&feature=youtu.be
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silverlight
I'm not usually one to hop on something and criticize when it's a Show HN.

But I have literally everything that this is doing already set up in my home
right now using an Amazon Echo, which is $200, instead of $10,000.

I can say "Trigger lights for projector", and lights dim how I want it. Or
"Trigger lights for guests" and bing, lights. I can say "Play my Lumineers
station on Pandora", and my Echo will play it. And of course I can ask Echo
all kinds of things like "What is the distance to the moon?" or "What is the
population of India?"

Plus a lot more.

So what is the value add here? How is this different/better than Echo + IFTT +
a Wink hub? I'm really genuinely curious, because this is something I am doing
right now and am totally willing to spend money on to do better, but based on
this short video I have no idea how this is better...

So I guess take that as constructive feedback from (presumably?) your target
audience -- show me something really cool this does to get me to consider
spending $10k on it.

~~~
cypher543
One thing I don't like about Echo, IFTT, and others like them is the fact that
everything has to go through "the cloud." If I'm sitting at home and want to
dim my lights, why do I need to send my voice to Amazon's server, have it call
out to IFTT, which calls back into my home? Especially since I have a data
cap. All of that can easily just go through a locally-installed system and you
don't need expensive hardware to do it.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
That's what's driven me to write my own home automation code. (Though my
code's terrible, not HN-worthy.) Anything that insists on a cloud API is out
in my book. A local server is potentially worth serious money, especially if
it's easy to use.

~~~
cypher543
I've been toying with something similar (mostly on paper so far) involving
custom GStreamer elements for voice recognition/synthesis, a Wit.ai-like
intent resolver for command & control, and ChatScript-like pattern matching
for conversational dialogue. My goal is to put it all behind a WebRTC and SIP
gateway and have a low-latency personal assistant that I can access from
virtually any device (even an old landline telephone) and that runs on my own
private server. That's the dream anyway. I'm stuck on the voice synthesizer,
at the moment...

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I started at device control. Once I get device control where I want it on my
home server, I'll expand out to being able to reach it elsewhere, and then
voice.

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urs2102
Awesome! This is great man. How long have you been working on this for, and
what are you using to processing the speech (is it internally developed or are
you leveraging an API or something)? This seems like a fun hack just for home.

A couple years ago in my dorm, I set up a clapper and set up a server to play
my music when I was out of my dorm, so that when I was coming home I could
play the sound of the clapper to get my lights started. Or if I was in my
room's WiFi network, I could ask Siri to play "Turn on the Lights", and it
would play an MP3 of me clapping and turn on the lights. This is obviously way
cooler, and I always thought I'd one day sit and hack out something like this
with Wit.ai or something. What are your plans for this?

~~~
alexcaps
Thanks! The NLP engine is a couple years in the making, but the app and
product are just a few months in. Were initially building for large homes
where voice control can be super helpful, but we're already working on
developer tools to let others build Josh into their systems. Your hack sounds
pretty awesome. If you don't already have one, think about getting a Sonos
Play:1 and tinkering with the unofficial API. You can do some pretty fun
things with it.

* just a note, we are working with an official private Sonos API, it's just hard to get access if you're starting out tinkering.

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schappim
This isn't really AI. This is just speech recognition. I did something similar
back in 2011 [http://m.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/aussie-hacks-
siri-t...](http://m.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/aussie-hacks-siri-to-
automate-home-20111201-1o9zj.html)

Props for having a go at making this a company, I tried to do this with
ninjablocks.com best of luck!

Happy to share lessons learned.

~~~
alexcaps
Thanks! Would love to chat, alex@jstar.ai

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michaelmior
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with.

AFAICT, there is nothing here that we can play with and this should not be
Show HN post.

~~~
Zikes
While that is in the guidelines, it doesn't seem to be very strictly applied.
I think the goal of the guideline is primarily to have the opportunity to get
to know the project in order to critique it thoroughly, and sometimes a
presentation is the only viable option.

~~~
michaelmior
If that's the case then the guidelines should either be changed or actually be
enforced. Although I've seen dang remove the "Show HN" from posts before. To
me it's misleading given the current guidelines.

I don't buy the argument that "sometimes a presentation is the only viable
option." In this case and any other, the viable option is to keep working on
the product until it's ready for people to test.

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jerf
Is this "an AI", or "a voice control system preloaded with a bunch of sentence
command templates"?

I mean this as a neutral question, because it's cool either way, and does seem
like a bizarre little hole in the current "voice control" ecosystem, but
there's a difference in what I, at least as an HN reader, expect between the
two things, and I wanted to give you that feedback.

~~~
alexcaps
We're very much an AI company, and that's the focus, but the product will roll
out in stages. The foundation is built on a home-made NLP engine that's pretty
flexible. That said, NNs are only used for speech recognition currently. With
a relatively stable NLP engine we're focused now on device integration to
control the majority of IoT products our customers might have. We're
implementing some learning and pattern recognition models but it will take
some time before those come close to resembling any true "intelligence".

~~~
jerf
Thank you for the detailed answer. Best of luck!

Incidentally, I just complained in another post about the way that needing to
"invoke" voice mode makes it much less fluent. You may at least want to pop
that one on to the mental back burner to see if there's a solution you can
think of for it. I don't know what, but something that makes the friction of
invoking a voice app less would help a lot. (I assume this is where Amazon
Echo idea comes from.)

~~~
alexcaps
It's a double-edged sword for privacy reasons.

1\. A number of early customers we've spoken with don't like the idea of an
always listening device. The perception is an invasion of privacy.

2\. There's a fear that someone outside the home could simply yell a command
like "unlock the doors" to gain access. There are a number of ways one could
solve this, but it's a fear we've heard about.

So the extra friction of taking out your phone and pressing a button so far
seems worth the added layer of privacy and security, but we're definitely
thinking hard about this one.

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egypturnash
From the manifesto on your site:

> One of the challenges to building a fully automated house, particularly one
> that grows and evolves over time, is the ability to program with ease. In
> theory it’s great if your sprinklers turn off when it rains, or if the
> lights go on at sunset, but these actions today take a skilled programmer
> many hours to assemble. [...] Even complicated queries can be effortlessly
> programmed, such as, “At sunrise if I’m home slowly fade the bedroom lights
> on, open the drapes, turn on the radio, and brew a pot of coffee.”

That's interesting, yeah. I mean I spent a few hours recently building a
little script that makes my apartment's foyer light change based on the
temperature and weather during the day, and go to a dim red at night, and I
really wish it was a simpler process than "kludging together a Python script".

If you've got any of that kind of stuff up and running, you should be linking
to _that_ , not to a video that is essentially nothing you can't replicate
with Siri and a light system that registers with HomeKit, or Echo, Cortana, or
Google Now with similar plugins.

Also is there supposed to be any actual lists of brands of connected devices
in the 'works with' page? All I see is greyscale photos of various anonymous
devices with a word or two and an icon superimposed on them. It works with
"LIGHTING" and "OUTDOORS" and "SECURITY", great, does it work with _my_
lighting or outdoors or security?

Also: If the product is named "Josh", why is its default voice female? Has
"Josh" shifted from a male-coded name to a female-coded one when I wasn't
looking? Or is your product intended to present as a transman who really needs
to work on his voice?

~~~
alexcaps
Gender: we have a variety of systems set up and we try to give them each a
unique personality. My home, for example, is a male named Theodore with a
British accent. The LA office is Scarlett and the Denver office is Samantha.

Website: we have a new website launching soon with a lot more information. You
stumbled upon a page I hope to finish building today. Sorry for the confusion.

"Voice programming": We chose to focus on getting a product to market and
proving customer demand before building out the entire developer portal. It's
definitely the plan and we want to do it, it's just not where we see early
revenue coming from and as a small team we have to pick our battles. I can't
wait to open this stuff up when ready.

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ocdtrekkie
$5,000 is a pretty hefty price tag, can I assume there's some pretty
impressive stuff under the hood here?

EDIT: Actually, the reservation, which is "50%", is $5,000. Is it $10,000?

~~~
alexcaps
Yep, price tag is $10k. There's quite a bit under the hood you're not seeing
in this video, particularly considering large 10,000+ sq ft homes and managing
full home automation. If you're familiar with Crestron or Control4, we're
playing in that space for v1.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I have little to no experience with houses that size (I live in a condo), but
I understand the concept and the market segment, yes. It mentions that this
functions locally, so I take it there's a server involved, that I imagine is
some decent portion of this cost?

You may wish to find some way to clarify that market segment in your
marketing, I think a lot of HN visitors might assume this is going to be a $99
hub or something similar. We need to see that value represented, because we
are definitely going to dig up that price tag. ;D

~~~
alexcaps
Good points! Thanks for the feedback :)

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Killswitch
2 things.

\- My name is Josh, I like the name.

\- I've been looking for a nice short domain. Thanks for taking a cool one. :P

~~~
JshWright
I feel exactly the opposite... Why pick a reasonably common first name? Seems
like a recipe for confusion...

There is a reason names like "Siri" and "Cortana" were chosen (though I'll
grant you "Alexa" is a reasonably common name as well).

~~~
Killswitch
Cortana is the name of an AI in Halo series. That's why Microsoft chose it.

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wallacrw
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL7t5rV4J8Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL7t5rV4J8Q)

Just sayin.

~~~
hundchenkatze
Competition is generally a good thing, just saying.

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rvalue
When it said turn off all the lights, i was thinking, what a thing to say....
the whole room would go dark :D

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eli_gottlieb
Please stop calling things AIs. It just gets my hopes up.

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addedlovely
Your Stripe account is in test mode.

~~~
alexcaps
Thanks! I am honestly amazed so many people were able to get to that page. We
plan on going live with the website next week and right now it takes a fair
bit of digging around to get there. That said, it is technically "public"
facing so I'm fixing it up as soon as Stripe permits. Will probably disable
the button in the meantime if you go back.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The "learn more" button on the josh.ai home page has the new site's top bar.
It's compelling to push that. :P

