
Show HN: Wit – Natural language for your app - ar7hur
https://wit.ai
======
npalli
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 (speech -> text), so not sure why
they put Siri in the title. It is also not clear how they can ‘hijack’ the
text from Siri to do this analysis. The ASR engines they talk about (CMU,
OpenEars) have pretty horrible accuracy (compared to Siri or google voice).

2\. Looks like they do some form of text normalization/correction, again not
clear how they do it.

3\. The actual service they provide is a form of named entity recognition
(confusing named intent which clashes with the android intent mechanism in
their examples).

4\. Also they let you define your own entities to match. You can train them
using a drop –down menu. Not sure how you can train hundreds of examples using
point and click.

This different from alchemy (or many others) because this is open source(?)
[http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/features/entity-
extractio...](http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/features/entity-extraction/)

Given this service was for developers with an interest in NLP, it would have
been good if they didn’t hide behind a snow job title like “Siri as a
service”.

~~~
ar7hur
_> 1\. It doesn’t do any speech recognition (speech -> text), so not sure why
they put Siri in the title. It is also not clear how they can ‘hijack’ the
text from Siri to do this analysis. The ASR engines they talk about (CMU,
OpenEars) have pretty horrible accuracy (compared to Siri or google voice)._

Currently most Wit users use Google or Nuance with great success. You can even
use Android's offline speech rec.

That being said, CMU and OpenEars work well, as long as you provide them with
good language models (which you can't do if you hack a quick project). Our
plan is for Wit to automatically generate the right language models from your
instance configuration.

 _> 2\. Looks like they do some form of text normalization/correction, again
not clear how they do it. 3\. The actual service they provide is a form of
named entity recognition (confusing named intent which clashes with the
android intent mechanism in their examples)._

We abstract the full NLP stack for the developer. How we do it is not really
what matters to our developers, as long as it works :) Actually we use a
combination of many different NLP and machine learning techniques.

 _> 4\. Also they let you define your own entities to match. You can train
them using a drop –down menu. Not sure how you can train hundreds of examples
using point and click._

You don't need to train hundreds of examples. Plus, our users are not NLP/ML
experts and they prefer a graphical UI. But that's true it could be still more
efficient, we have good features in the roadmap for that :)

 _> This different from alchemy (or many others) because this is open
source(?) [http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/features/entity-
extractio...](http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/features/entity-extractio..).
_

Alchemy is great as a set of NLP tools, some of them quite academical, but
it's not designed from scratch to solve the problem we're trying to solve:
enable the masses of developers to easily add a natural language interface to
their app.

~~~
_sh
> How we do it is not really what matters to our developers, as long as it
> works :)

How you do it is _most certainly_ what matters to developers, as soon as it
doesn't work as expected :)

~~~
ar7hur
Fair enough.

 _Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.

Practice is everything works but no one knows why.

Here, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why_

:)

------
jasonkester
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 therefore can't form an opinion about it.

I think there was a picture of a robot on the screen for a few seconds, but
that's all I remember.

Would disabling javascript do the trick?

~~~
blandinw
Hi, fixed it! Thanks for that first feedback!

EDIT: All animations (except "What we do") should be disabled. Please, email
me at willy@wit.ai if you still have issues.

~~~
jasonkester
Better, 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 don't notice it. But as somebody trying to read
a page, it's really jarring to have that happen. Enough so that I give up
trying because I just want it to stop doing that to my eyes.

Any chance you could turn it off completely and just put some arrow icons on
there?

------
MasterScrat
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 their
app." I expect you to handle things from start to finish.

Also, let me try it! It's frustrating because the UI looks like you can
experiment but it's only an animated demo (or am I missing something??) In
particular the mic logo is used to record on Google and here it doesn't seem
to do anything?

~~~
ar7hur
> You should make it clearer that you don't actually handle voice recognition.

You're right, we'll make it more clear on the landing page. A full out-of-the-
box integration with some voice recognition engines (we love CMU Sphinx, open
source) is in our roadmap.

> Also, let me try it!

We purposely didn't provide a "end-user" demo (something that would look like
chatting with Siri) because we want to focus first on the developer
experience, when they configure Wit to understand their very own end-users
intents. You can require an invite and try this in less than 5 minutes.

~~~
MasterScrat
> 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 5 minutes!"

You usually have to wait several days when you apply for a beta like this.

~~~
ar7hur
I just accepted your invite :)

------
lutusp
The 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 primitive kind of voice recognition, but it doesn't use
Siri.

On this topic, I invite people to try out my non-prototype, non-project _toy_
that uses Google's support for HTML5 speech recognition. It's pretty funny how
wrong things go when you try to say something even a bit out of the ordinary:

[http://arachnoid.com/speech_to_text](http://arachnoid.com/speech_to_text)

If I say, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their
country," an old teletype test sentence, the Google recognizer always nails
it. If I say, "I hit an uncharted rock and my boat is being repaired," things
go hilariously wrong, and every time differently.

~~~
mrosethompson
I also found it going very well or very, very badly.

For instance: "In most cases, before beginning to listen, the browser will ask
permission to monitor your microphone."

Came out as: "In Las Cruces, f __ __ __listen, permission to monitor your
microphone. "

~~~
lutusp
I think in the future, when computers are 100 times more intelligent than they
are, we'll laugh at these examples. But no one should doubt the difficulty of
interpreting continuous speech without prior training for a given speaker.
It's no wonder that speech interpretation on telephones tend to be limited to
understanding a handful of possible responses: "Yes", "No", "Let me speak to a
human!"

------
xauronx
I 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 translation of that into actions.

Just a heads up, but Get Started on the pricing page does nothing. It's
natural progression for me to go home page->pricing->OK, looks good, let's get
started.

~~~
ar7hur
Thanks for the feedback.

Wit takes the output of the voice recognition engine as input. It's quite
robust to voice recognition errors. Most devs use Google's engine or the open
source CMU Sphinx engine.

Fixed the Get Started link, thanks!

------
endlessvoid94
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 webkitSpeechRecognition:

[https://github.com/dpaola2/jarvis](https://github.com/dpaola2/jarvis) (work
in progress)

I absolutely would love a better NLP api. Please let me in!

~~~
ar7hur
Jarvis-like systems are a great use case.

You should be able to sign up now.

~~~
endlessvoid94
You rock

------
ar7hur
Hey everyone. Wit guy here. We've been working on Wit the past few months and
we think it's time to get your feedback. I'm happy to answer any questions you
have.

Bringing Natural Language Understanding to the masses of developers is hard
and we still have a lot of work ahead of us. Please don't hesitate to reach
out to us!

~~~
post_break
Is Siri required? Is there an option for Android devices? I admit I didn't
dive too deep into the website because I was looking at all the eye candy.

~~~
ar7hur
No, Siri is not required.

Here is a tutorial for quick Android integration:
[https://wit.ai/docs/android-tutorial](https://wit.ai/docs/android-tutorial)

------
chrislomax
Nice concept, I just came back on here to let you know that I don't know what
is happening on that page but I left it open about 45 minutes ago and noticed
my fan kicked in a lot. It was that page I left open. Ended up taking 25% CPU,
you didn't work on the iTunes software did you??

Only messing, it was taking a lot of CPU though.

~~~
blandinw
Haha, sorry about that.. I guess we are better at Clojure than Angular.js!

Working on a fix now.

------
MasterScrat
The .ai extension is cute :-)

I don't know if people will remember it and be receptive to this touch but I
like it.

------
ragebol
Interesting! Nothing happened after I registered with my Github account though
using Opera. I also wonder how this compares to
[http://www.maluuba.com/](http://www.maluuba.com/) ?

~~~
ar7hur
> how this compares to [http://www.maluuba.com](http://www.maluuba.com)

Wit is 100% open and flexible, you can create any intent you need for your
app, you're not limited to a static set of domains/actions.

EDIT: @ragebol we are very interested in ROS and robotics, don't hesitate to
get in touch with me arthur at wit dot ai. In the future we would like to
provide an off-the-shelf human/robot communication module for developers.

~~~
ragebol
Awesome! I made a wrapper around Maluuba for ROS before
([https://github.com/yol/maluuba_ros](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 command like "Introduce yourself" or "Grab that
can for me" because of the limited set of categories. Wit should be able to
handle those as well, from the looks of it.

~~~
drewch
We (Maluuba) are actually working on improving nAPI and now have the ability
to define your own domains and actions. It's not public yet, but we're
planning on releasing it mid November.

~~~
ragebol
Nice! I'll check back on Maluuba in November.

------
fjabre
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
user's voice to text and make it easily accessible to my application but how
does WIT access the text generated from a Siri request in the first place for
example? Does WIT have some other way of getting at this data that has already
been converted from voice to text by Siri or Google or some other speech-to-
text engine?

~~~
ar7hur
> AFAIK there is no official way to interact with Siri or Google voice rec.

Actually there are ways. On Android devices, voice rec is available to devs
(even offline if the user enabled it!). We have a simple tutorial about how to
integrate on Android [https://wit.ai/docs/android-
tutorial](https://wit.ai/docs/android-tutorial)

Right now on iOS you have two options (none of them involves Siri, which is
kept closed by Apple):

1/ Do the voice rec server-side (Siri does that)

2/ Use OpenEars to do it client-side

Server-side, you have many voice rec options, including open source CMU
Sphinx.

Providing a fully-integrated solution with speech rec out of the box is in our
roadmap.

------
dhucerbin
You could read witai as "witaj" in Polish, which means "hello" in slightly
official manner.

------
drakaal
Sounds like they are trying to be this,
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko-r4gpM3Rc](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.

~~~
ar7hur
Hi Stremor! :)

Looks like you focus on search, summary, entity and sentiment extraction with
a rule-based approach.

Wit's focus is to power human/machine interfaces, and our priority is to
provide developers with a 100% configurable solution, with no prior assumption
on their domain. And we don't believe in rules, we chose a machine learning
approach.

~~~
drakaal
No, PleaseAPI is converting Natural Language to Database like
structures/commands with no need to have a human come up with every way you
could say something because the vocabulary is built in.

Unlike Wit it also offers the option to use the API's that are already
integrated or Bring Your Own Backend so that you can have a mix of
info/responses from your own system, or leverage what is already there.

~~~
StavrosK
Where can I sign up for that?

~~~
drakaal
It will be on Mashape shortly, the Natural Language Part of Speech Tagger just
went live Friday. Documentation takes time after we write code and is less fun
to write. :-)

------
sinzone
Hi guys, here you can find the full API Documentation:
[https://www.mashape.com/lxbrun/nlp-and-voice-interface-
for-a...](https://www.mashape.com/lxbrun/nlp-and-voice-interface-for-
apps#!documentation)

------
rch
This would be great for open source projects, but I feel like I would trip
over a very large pile of patents if I tried to build a product around it. I
don't have any relevant experience myself though, so it's just a feeling.

------
radley
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 / month.

~~~
ar7hur
That's why at the bottom of the pricing page we encourage you to contact us if
you have more than 1M calls per month.

Meanwhile you can decide to share your configuration data and get Wit for free
(à la Github) :)

------
BrandiATMuhkuh
I'm interested to use it in combination with a robot (NAO). Could you provide
a tutorial for it. Not sure if ROS on NAO will be necessary or not.

------
tonydiv
This looks neat, I will definitely keep it in mind.

I would be weary of using the Github Octocat mascot though. I believe Octocat
is protected under copyright.

~~~
hackula1
The landing page looks like a minefield of legal issues. Marketing everything
explicitly with the references to Siri is asking for a law suit from Apple.

~~~
ar7hur
Fucking sue me :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6366912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6366912)

~~~
hackula1
:) I just wanted to say that it looks like a really cool project, so I would
not want some troll to come and stomp it out.

------
skram
How does this compare and contrast to [http://www.ask-
ziggy.com/](http://www.ask-ziggy.com/) ?

~~~
ar7hur
We share the same vision that voice becomes the key human/machine interface,
especially for the upcoming generation of wearable devices, home automation,
etc.

I don't know if Ask Ziggy is 100% self-service for the developers. That's a
key requirement for us.

~~~
blazingfrog2
At Ask Ziggy, we are also 100% self-service.

~~~
StavrosK
Is there a pricing page?

~~~
blazingfrog2
Not at this point. Feel free to sign up for the beta on our site and take it
for a spin, I'll make sure to get you your credentials quickly. PS: by the
way, big fan of historio.us...

~~~
StavrosK
Already did, thanks! It looks pretty nice, I'd like to implement it in a few
of my apps for an easier UI. I'm glad you like historious, thanks!

------
hipaulshi
hah! My startup is doing a similar platform in a little bigger scale. I
realized I did pretty bad on the hackathon :(
[http://on.aol.com/video/jarvis-2-0-demo-at-hackathon-
sf-2013...](http://on.aol.com/video/jarvis-2-0-demo-at-hackathon-
sf-2013-517925607)

~~~
ar7hur
I'd love to see the full video of your demo, it looks cool!

------
veg
This looks really promising - can't wait to see where it is in a year with
community additions.

------
MasterScrat
This "fade-in as you scroll" thing is annoying. Get-rid-of-it-right-now kind
of annoying.

~~~
blandinw
Just removed it, thanks :)

------
cookiedough
How do you compare to Ask Ziggy? It seems you have created an interface
similar to theirs

~~~
ar7hur
Actually I think the developer UX is quite different... but you should try
both and make your own opinion.

------
GuriK
what about languages other then English ?

~~~
ar7hur
French + English available now. Which language would you like to get?

~~~
Cyranix

      - Spanish (Mexican, Castellano, others?)
      - Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese)
      - Hindi
    

These would be logical next steps with some important commonalities: broad
base of native speakers, high importance in the US market (maybe less so for
Hindi), and very important dialect differences. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi,
and Russian could also force the issue of non-Romanized character sets.

------
illyism
As a Service? Why not go open source?

~~~
MasterScrat
How would you make money with that? honest question.

~~~
est
How to sell free software

[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html)

~~~
yetanotherphd
It's obvious to most people (regardless of whether you think that free
software is in important principle) that the techniques described in that
section will result in you making MUCH LESS money, at least in the current
context of these people selling their API.

------
sally888
Great job on this. Are there any plans for Ruby or javascript tutorials, or am
I being too optimistic?

~~~
ar7hur
Here is a node.js tutorial: [https://wit.ai/docs/nodejs-
tutorial](https://wit.ai/docs/nodejs-tutorial)

We'll release a Ruby tutorial soon!

~~~
sally888
Love you guys already. Thank you!

------
sally888
Looks great. Will this work with web apps too, or only mobile apps?

~~~
lsiebert
I wonder how easy it would be to get it working on the desktop, like Palaver
does on linux.

