
Show HN: Wriber – Idea Generator - wriber
https://www.wriber.com
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christudor
Hey, just had a go at this for five minutes, and here's what I thought. I'm
probably not your 'target customer', but here's my feedback anyway!

First impression: I'm not really sure what the site does.

The first thing I see is the logo, and I don't really know what 'Write better
content' means. It's too vague.

I'm then asked to 'Enter three keywords for better content creation'. I still
don't know what this means, or why I'm doing this, but I do it anyway, because
I want to see what happens.

I searched for 'free online education', at which point it spent a bit of time
loading, before coming up with ideas for blog posts (I think!). However, some
of these were a bit nonsensical, e.g. 'Whose the inclusion of links to items
do not reflect their importance', 'May students also search for courses by
subject, language, and institution?', 'Did a few other universities offer
online textbooks?'

Conclusion: I don't mind that the algorithm is a bit iffy at the moment,
becuase some of the ideas for blog posts were fairly sensible. But the
messaging on the site is unclear.

Just my opinion, of course -- and one that doesn't seem to be shared by others
here!

~~~
wriber
Thanks for your feedback, Chris. Today has been a crazy day!

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CJKinni
So I had to retry my search after five minutes, but was really impressed with
the results. I searched "Roguelike Game Development." About a third were
meaningless, a third were meaningless but made me think of something useful,
and a third I could probably use as interview questions when talking to a game
developer.

Any chance of an API? I'm working on a head mounted display software system
that could integrate something like this, not as a writing prompt, but as a
conversation prompt with someone.

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wriber
Our servers are blowing up right now. Fixing.

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djtriptych
Works fine for me. Pretty impressive results (I used the pre-populated query;
"peanut butter alternatives").

Curious about the tech behind the site...

~~~
wriber
Thank you! There's some information retrieval, NLP, semantic analysis, and
machine learning going on. All of our stuff is proprietary (4 non-provisional
patents are filed).

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landtco
2 cents from the CEO of a content marketing company:

One thing that humans will continue to be better at than machines for a very
long time is creating interesting stories for other humans. There is no
machine that has nearly written a Faulkner novel, or even written up anything
more complex than a baseball game (which is itself impressive, though the
template is not much more complex than a complicated madlib). When you read
machine written stuff, it stinks of the machine that made it. The wriber
software is little different at this stage, as evidenced by some of the
mangled "ideas" it's generated for others on this thread.

Software and data absolutely have a place in any good editorial strategy, but
presuming an algorithm can furnish ideas that will perform better than humans
armed with data-driven insights is a mistake in my opinion.

Our content strategists are armed with boatloads of social data, they identify
trending topics, top performing articles from competitors etc., and all of
that informs the human decisions they make as the editors of their brand
publications about what gets written.

At the end of the day, though, I'm going to leave the decision making (and a
good part of the ideation) to the talented humans that make up the L&T Co.
team.

I'm more compelled by software that helps my team come to data-driven insights
themselves than by software that purports to "do the hard part" for them.

~~~
wriber
This is really good feedback, landtco. I want to make sure that we don't give
off that impression. One of our customers is a digital agency that creates
content for companies.

The ideas provided are meant to prompt thinking. Sometimes they provide the
actual content, but the majority of the time, they help you research your
topic (we include a URL in the paid version and allow you take snippets out of
sources really easy). This is especially useful if your writers are not all
subject matter experts for niche content.

We also do a lot more than provide ideas. For instance, if you're writing for
a lot of companies, they may all have style guidelines that you have to
follow. Instead of having to remember all the rules, you can customize Wriber
to check for them.

~~~
landtco
I'd be interested to check out some of that functionality. We should connect.
Drop me a line at Cooper@landt.co

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cscharenberg
I like it already. I typed in some words related to my startup and it proposed
some really good prompts I could turn into articles. Other content-generation
sites have given terrible results and suggestions, usually in a Buzzfeed style
"6 things you'll never guess about art!".

This site I could take a few of these and go write a few paragraphs about off-
the-cuff. Looking forward to playing more when the site comes back up.

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adriancooney
Wow, this was very impressive. I tried "inverse document frequency" since it
was related to the report I'm working on and it came back with surprisingly
good questions on the topic albeit a little broken ("How did the number of
times a term appear?") in some places.

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rjpower9000
What I really need at the moment is a service that tells which of my ideas is
the least stupid.

I'd pay a lot for that.

~~~
nfoz
Mechanical Turk?

~~~
hallman76
Friend + Beer?

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tyurok
I tried with some niche content and got some weird combinations, but it still
gave me a good ideia on how to write something about it in bullet points,
which is really nice. Keep it up, I'll definitely keep checking.

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infinitone
Tried 'waterless car wash', and got some incoherent and grammatically
erroneous results like:

\- Which organization will make their car look?

\- Did dry Wash help someone to clean their car without using water?

\- Explore what sort of organization green Shine is?

\- Explain how Eco Auto Clean is back at it Again Hey there waterless car wash
fans.

I'm guessing its using NLP and some knowledge graph and picking top terms. But
still needs work.

~~~
SandersAK
I did Donkey Friend Time and got:

\- Discuss what sorts of organizations donkey Kong, Diddy, and Cranky are?

\- Did Diddy Kong refuse to hand over the banana hoard after what?

\- What did the more someone know about miniature donkeys before someone buys?

~~~
resc1440
"dog eats software"

\- Examine why dogs will eat poop.

\- In what way did many dog owners get very upset when their dog eats poop?

\- Is this a wonderful opportunity for their dog to interact with someone?

\- Talk about what some dogs are.

\- How do some dogs have instincts to carry stuff in their mouths?

\- What is the cloud?

~~~
daltonlp
"cold embrace death"

\- What showing a large black bird sitting between candles?

\- Talk about why those burning eyes spoke of terrible things that have been
done.

\- What is fuck all?

\- Did daylight blind their way the sun will never shine through someone?

\- Was the military encampment calling to them like a bitch in heat?

\- Describe how it was not long before they were under assault by infected.

\- Did the boy sprint towards the doors that would answer his questions?

\- What did the strain of making ends meet and paying for?

\- How does someone not know too much helpful spells yet?

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chipgap98
Not working for me. Maybe we gave it the HN hug?

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boniface316
I am really confused on what excatly it does. Does it generate ways to solve a
problem?

I would personally would like to know how many other people have searched what
I was looking for. Say I was allergic to peanuts and looking for alternative
and I find out there are so many other guys are searching for the same
thing....then I know its a common problem.

~~~
wriber
Hi, it's meant to give you ideas to write about in an article or blog post. If
you're every wondering what to say, this can prompt you.

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danvoell
Cool tool. Worked pretty well for a specific niche that I am in. Might want to
better identify why someone would want a demo? Are there additional features?
Is there something that costs money that does more than the free version? Is
there a way to sign up without getting the demo?

~~~
cscharenberg
Agree on the demo points here. I saw the video and want to try the product. I
don't need a demo at all. Just let me sign up. Or request a beta invite, or
something.

I definitely don't want a sales call to show me everything I just saw in the
video.

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flashman
Wow, this tool is really... smartdumb? I don't mean that as an insult, it
generates ideas that are 90% complete and requires you to fill in the rest
yourself. It's almost like a mind-mapping tool: start with a central topic,
and branch out to related material.

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wirddin
Not working for me. Sounds interesting though, make a beta signup for
notification till it is down?

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damoncali
Pretty cool. Returned some gibberish, and some solid sparks for topics. I
wonder if you could tweak it to rank the relevance somehow. Maybe have users
train it by clicking/removing crappy results, or some such. Not really my
specialty - just thinking out loud.

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WWKong
I was skeptical, but it really works. It is going to help a lot of folks with
content marketing.

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simonswords82
Would be useful if there were more examples of what to search for on the
landing page. I'm stumped for ideas of what to enter. I saw there was one
example in the textbox but I need more for context.

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amirouche
Love it. I would love to know how this works.

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desireco42
I kind of upvoted this in principle, but I can't try it. Look forward to when
it gets a little later.

~~~
wriber
It's working now!

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mdpm
'Generating your ideas'.

This copy made my future hurt.

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jpatel3
"data literacy education"

Waiting since last 5 mins :(

~~~
wriber
Please try again :)

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sgtnasty
And.... its down

~~~
wriber
We're back up! Sorry for the delay.

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willthefirst
i thought this was a joke, it is not.

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kamilrextin
Super duper shit mate. You should definitely have a beta signup or some other
form for folks who either visit and its down or don't want to demo right away?

