
Show HN: Leova – An API to Add AI-Powered Voice to Mobile Apps in Mere Minutes - digital_ins
https://www.leova.io
======
digital_ins
Hi Everybody! I'm part of the team and we built Leova to make adding fully-
functional natural language interfaces to your home-brewn or production-scale
apps would be super easy. Integration is (supposed to be) super simple and
deployment, even easier. We've got a couple of short videos on the website to
show off how effortless it's supposed to be.

The NLP AI is conversational and as people use it, a small machine-learner
learns to 'fix' errors in the recognition of whichever speech recognizer it
has been paired with it. The entire system has been modeled around human
conversation and works without keywords and without forcing users to speak to
it in a rigid way, like an IVR system.

This first release is for LeovaTravel, which is this one :-)

The next 3 months will see us deploy the next two variants - a natural
language AI for ordering food; and one for shopping / ecommerce, both wrapped
in APIs.

------
ashwindsousa
This would actually be a lot better with speech recognition built in. Is that
something in the works?

~~~
digital_ins
Actually, today's speech recognizers are really good and ones like Google's
have accuracy >90%. So writing a speech recognizer ourselves with 50% accuracy
and training it endlessly without ever reaching Google SR's accuracy sounded
like a terrible 'reinvent-the-wheel' idea.

Instead, we wrote algorithms that further boosted the accuracy of the existing
speech recognizer with machine-generated phonetic dictionaries. (You can think
of it as standing on the shoulders of giants). The plan is to work with a
couple of partners to train our machine learning system for their products to
really bump up SR accuracy.

If you're building an app that's going to go live, send us a message, we'd be
happy to work with you (for free!)

------
tech_crawl_
Maybe it's just me ... or does the demo seem to be sped up? Like soundhound's
demo...

~~~
dhruvsachde
I'm a part of the team and lol, no - that's just Chadd's "demo voice". I think
the feeling that the demo was sped up comes because we made those card
transitions so fast. If you sign up, you can actually try the demo yourself to
see that it really is that quick :-)

~~~
digital_ins
orrrrrr, if you watch the demo video really closely, you'll see how you can
try the system out without actually having to sign up

------
grizzlybear007
I see you are using google speech recognizer for chrome and I guess it works
the same with android, how do I use it for developing apps for iOS. Does it
work with Siri ?

~~~
dhruvsachde
For iOS development you can use iSpeech Recognition, OpenEars, Nuance or CMU
Sphinx for speech to text. We use iSpeech and it was really simple to
integrate.

~~~
grizzlybear007
Ya but ispeech accuracy is not that great

~~~
digital_ins
So that's where Leova really shines. We saw this shortfall in accuracy when we
were using iSpeech for testing on iOS, so we built a machine learning system
that generated structured phonetic dictionaries.

This means that Leova provides a layer of error correction over and above
specifically iSpeech's transcriptions. And with frequent usage (days, not
weeks) you'll see Leova's interpretations of buggy iSpeech transcriptions
really blow competing NLP parsers' resilience out of the water

------
hawaii_writer
Seems to be pretty accurate - Is nltk being used on the backend?

~~~
digital_ins
Thanks! We've actually built our own probabilistic information extractor, so
we don't use the POS tagging, so NLTK is sorta redundant for the approach we
took (and also less accurate)

