
Ask HN: Do you know of any good product taking advantage of NLP? - julienreszka
Natural language processing seems very popular today but is it actually any good and useful?
When was your last encounter with a good product taking advantage of this technology?
======
anthony_doan
Gmail.

It gives suggestion on reply message. I use it a lot.

NLP can be use in informational retrieval such as organizing things into
cluster of topics via LDA.

I've met someone with the mindset that AI is a fad and that what have it done
so far? I disagree, it may be over hype but I see that person using Siri. I
use Hello Google and I consider that to be NLP not the traditional statistic
NLP but the deep learning NLP kind.

Also those website translator such as google translator and old school babel
translate helped me a lot when I was trying to search for things that were in
Japanese. There were a few famous Korean and Chinese novels that are machine
translated and it's decent enough to read if you're really into that novel and
willing to ignore the quality.

~~~
krisrm
Interesting to hear that - I actually find Gmail's autoreply feature to be
extremely annoying. When it's not suggesting outright inappropriate responses
(once had it suggest "Ok! see you there!" on a thread about a funeral a
colleague was attending), they just seem trite and useless.

~~~
GordonS
I also don't like this feature. I've used it only perhaps a handful of times
since it was introduced, but every other time it has actually cost me the time
it took to read and mentally reject the suggestion.

I really need to poke around the settings and see if it can be disabled...

~~~
Spooky23
They recently updated it and it is much more relevant in my case. (More
business than personal)

Keep in mind features like this are built around the needs of the people who
make it. Outlook is sort of a snapshot of the needs of a Microsoft employee
circa 1996. GMail is a little better, but is still of reflection of the
company.

------
lettergram
It depends on what you mean useful. My startup tracks everyone’s mood,
activity, and experise on HN. Checkout yourself:

[https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=&search=julienres...](https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=&search=julienreszka)

This can be used to great effect in companies. Essentially, we deploy a search
engine for tribal knowledge in a company. Overall, we see significant
improvements company wide. Reduced turnover and in turn improved knowledge
retention

~~~
comboy
Whoa.

So have you already started analyzing word patterns and finding different
accounts people have on the same service and also correlating them between
multiple services?

People do leave much more information about themselves on the internet than
they realize.

~~~
lettergram
I have been able to correlate cross platform and even cross usernames:

[https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/104189476543920128...](https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/1041894765439201281?s=21)

I don’t make that available and personally think that’s a bit too intrusive

~~~
comboy
Nice. I thought just n-grams are powerful enough but you seem to be already
working with many more dimensions.

------
saternius
QuillBot ([https://quillbot.com](https://quillbot.com)) is a full-sentence
thesaurus that will rephrase any sentence you give it. Full disclosure, I am a
co-founder.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
I just put in “My name is Bill”

And got back

“My name is Proposal”

------
sktrdie
Almost any google search you do or any siri question you ask takes advantage
of the NLP research that has been produced in academia over the last decades.

Theoretical research of these subjects it's not like an open-source project
used in industry: "who's using this tool to do x, y and z?". The output of NLP
research is the combination of thousands of various papers that, all combined,
makes something like a siri search possible.

~~~
julienreszka
Is Siri any good ? I don't use siri I don't know, do you think it is?

~~~
twright
Siri isn't very strong, it can answer (very) basic questions and resorts to
web searches when it can't answer. I find it occasionally mishearing me or
completely parsing my question incorrectly. I recall a particularly bad one:
"set a timer for 3 minutes and 15 seconds" and somehow it interpreted it as an
arithmetic question "the answer is 18."

Alexa and particularly Google Assistant are much better, the latter retaining
context between questions e.g: "who is the 44th president of the US" followed
by "who is his wife?" is a neat trick.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Contextual carryover has been present in Alexa for a while too.

[https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/15bf7d2a-5e5c-...](https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/15bf7d2a-5e5c-4d43-90ae-c2596c9cc3a6/how-
alexa-is-learning-to-converse-more-naturally)

------
hbcondo714
We use NLP / sentiment analysis at Last10K.com to highlight positive and
negative remarks inside lengthy annual and quarterly reports of publicly-
traded companies in the US. Here's an example of a report filed yesterday:

[https://last10k.com/sec-
filings/vnce/0001564590-19-011520.ht...](https://last10k.com/sec-
filings/vnce/0001564590-19-011520.htm)

------
Jefro118
I'm building a Chrome extension[1] which uses NLP to determine whether you're
on task by comparing the topics contained in any new page opened.

It works fairly well, albeit not perfectly at this point.

[1] - [https://deepmode.app](https://deepmode.app)

~~~
rahulrrixe
Looks really cool extension. I would like to give it a try. I tried to click
the Subscribe button but it is not working.

~~~
Jefro118
Damn that's annoying, my apologies. Will fix as soon as I can get to my
laptop.

------
The_Amp_Walrus
Translation is a NLP problem... Isn't it? I've used Google translate to read
non-english websites and found it quite useful. Is text to speech a NLP
problem? Today's TTS products are actually listenable these days.

------
boldslogan
Text Analytics such as: Topic Modeling (extract the topics from customer
reviews / interviews / text documents)

Sentiment Analysis (get the tonality from the entire text or the tonality from
specific parts of the text)

Disclaimer I work at a web application / API text analytics company:
[https://gavagai.io/](https://gavagai.io/)

Here are a Quora post my CTO speaks more about our tool and analyzing survey
text data.

[https://www.quora.com/Whats-an-automatic-efficient-way-to-
an...](https://www.quora.com/Whats-an-automatic-efficient-way-to-analyze-
answers-to-open-ended-survey-questions)

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-approach-to-
quantify-...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-approach-to-quantify-
qualitative-survey-data)

------
marmada
A lot of students (including me) use Google Translate, and less frequently
deepl.com (deepl is better, but less known), to do foreign language
assignments. Oftentimes, one can write the initial sentence in English, run it
through deepl, and make a few fix-ups before turning in the assignment.

------
formalsystem
Besides the obvious applications like search and voice assistants here's a few
really good ones

* [https://www.grammarly.com/](https://www.grammarly.com/) is pretty interesting. Corrects your grammar and not just your syntax

* Swype keyboard which uses your spelling corrections as a way to better figure out how you use a swype keyboard

* [https://flexibits.com/fantastical](https://flexibits.com/fantastical) and many other calendar apps do NLP stuff to pull out meeting info. Microsoft, Google and Facebook do this kind of stuff pretty well (Disclosure: I worked on such features at Microsoft)

Happy to give more examples if people are interested in working in this space.

~~~
julienreszka
Yes, please do give more!

------
xiaolingxiao
Past NLP researcher chiming in here. Google Home and Alexa use pretty
sophisticated speech to text software to decouple your voice from background
noise, and then translate our speech to text, and then from text to program
triggers that ie turn off your lights. It may sound trivial but the Home work
so well it really is kind of magical.

The Chatbot stuff is more questionable, especially the ones based on deep
neural nets ( again I've published in this domain so I looked at it pretty
closely ).

Twitter/FB/Douyin/Google all use NLP to tune their feed or give you search
results.

Just to give you some examples...

------
fjaguero
I work as a PM for Lang.ai. We develop unsupervised NLP technology that helps
companies understand (by clustering topics and tags) thousands of texts from
virtually any language without the need of a training phase. This is currently
helping -from call centers to chatbots- to discover the new things that people
is talking about and learning about it automatically.

As @anthony_doan mentioned, this is something that is actively being used by
consumers and companies.

------
rerx
Neural machine translation (NLP with deep neural networks) has become quite
good and is increasingly put into useful products.

(Disclaimer: I work on DeepL translator)

~~~
julienreszka
Very good work with DeepL. I'm often in contact with professional translators
and they are very impressed.

~~~
ilaksh
Does DeepL work better than Google Translate? For Spanish and Russian?

------
ebzlo
I'm the founder at Akia ([https://akia.ai](https://akia.ai)). We're using NLP
to help hotels with the number of inbound they receive from guests who are
coming on or staying on property.

Though I'm not personally a regular user, from what I've observed, the AI is
able to very, very efficiently resolve a significant number of requests
because a lot of the messaging is the same: "what's the wifi?" "bring me
towels" "can i get my car?" etc.

The application of NLP for a niche industry has felt particularly appropriate
for a small startup where in contrast, doing generic NLP really feels like a
boil the ocean type strategy that makes more sense to those who have the
resources (google/apple).

~~~
TomMarius
In the second screenshot, there are suggested messages. One of them says "Good
afternoon, _Mr._ Washington...". Does your app understand gender?

------
dmcswain
Custom Voice Commands is an iPhone and Android smartphone app that uses NLP to
allow you to tag photos, videos, notes and web pages with questions or
phrases. For example, you can tag a bunch of photos with the phrase "show me
my favorite lunch photos" and every time you speak that phrase you'll see a
slideshow of those photos.

Photo Recall is an Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant app that lets you
retrieve Unsplash photos by voice plus photo slideshows created with Custom
Voice Commands can be viewed from your Amazon Echo Show or Google Home Hub (or
via the Google Assistant app).

[https://treycent.com/app/content/photo-
recall.html](https://treycent.com/app/content/photo-recall.html)

------
ashelmire
Uh... it’s all around you!

All voice recognition and text prediction is a result of nlp. Every time you
search on google, or say “hey Siri/Alexa”. Every time you call an automated
service and it asks you why you’re calling and connects you to the right
department. When you type a text message and it completes a word and predicts
the next one. It affects what ads you get shown. It lets companies
automatically block negative reviews with sentiment analysis (not always used
for good). Or to quickly find where supplies are needed in emergencies by
parsing twitter feeds in all languages. Etc.

If you own a smartphone, you interact with nlp technologies dozens of times
per day. So yeah, it’s good and useful.

------
hprotagonist
Fantastical does a very good job of figuring out calendaring from freeform
text entry.

[https://flexibits.com/fantastical](https://flexibits.com/fantastical)

------
ma2rten
Text classification is widely used in almost any major website, for example
for spam detection, putting things into categories, detecting inappropriate
content, ...

------
nixpulvis
I suppose spell checking (and then grammar too) has been the most ubiquitous
use of NLP to date. Unless I'm missing something even more pervasive
(software).

------
leowoo91
Not to be confused with Neuro Linguistic Programming...

------
MediumD
Another shameless plug. My company's product extracts conversations from Slack
to automatically generate polished FAQs for the purpose of answering repeat
questions. We also use this to give teams visibility into how much time is
being spent responding and what types of questions they're getting.

Our website: [https://landria.io](https://landria.io)

------
superzadeh
Emma is a Chrome Extension that combines NLP and psychology to tell you more
about someone on LinkedIn.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/emma-by-bunchai-
ne...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/emma-by-bunchai-
networkin/knmcggplopnagoamkpjegalagbhedpce)

------
lewisjoe
We are building Zoho Writer, a full featured word processor for the browser
([https://www.zoho.com/writer/zia.html](https://www.zoho.com/writer/zia.html)),
and we use NLP (Deep Learning) for suggesting grammar corrections & writing
tips to users.

------
codr7
Translation services, Unbabel [0] is the only one I have experience with (they
went through YC a few years back). And I noticed a couple of days ago they're
hiring developers in Lisbon.

[0] [https://unbabel.com/](https://unbabel.com/)

------
MissionControl
[https://www.chowly.com/](https://www.chowly.com/)

They are a great service to restaurants and use NLP to automate a lot of
service integration such as between the embedded POS system and delivery
companies.

------
ackbar03
Interested as well, but I keep feeling nlp is relatively less stable and
mature compared to vision, thus maybe only used in niche ways rather than full
fledged products, other than obvious ones like echo and siri of course

------
topicseed
[https://topicseed.com](https://topicseed.com) (shameless plug) is using NLP
and a knowledge graph to help SEO experts cover their focus topics
comprehensively.

------
xchip
facebook, they are scanning your chats trying to figure out what is your
political party, social status and needs so they can sell you more stuff, more
expensive and more often.

~~~
julienreszka
right. but is it actually any good at it?

------
softwaredoug
Most search engine products, be it job search, Airbnb, e-commerce, Google, etc
are going to have a lot of opportunities and use for NLP to understand queries
and content.

------
jbardnz
Expanding on the OP question, does anyone know anybody doing interesting
things with abstractive summarization (outside of salesforce or whitepapers)?

------
mijoharas
Seems like it's too obvious as it's a chat bot, but I think meetcleo is pretty
good (disclaimer: I work there)

------
chrispauley
NLP is used in a lot of marketing tools. Check out crimson hexagon, infegy
atlas, netbase

------
thedevindevops
A lot of (the better) customer service/support chat bots use NLP to assist
users.

~~~
julienreszka
Can you please give the names of the products that you are talking about?

~~~
jtloong
There are a decent number of companies that use NLP voice recognition when you
call their support lines. So when you call, instead of pressing a number on
your key pad to move through the directory you can speak it.

In that same vein, I've seen companies that have "chat support" use NLP bots
to get a feel for the type of question a person is looking for before handing
off to a human support person.

I've also seen AI personal assistants that handle meeting schedules etc like
[https://x.ai/](https://x.ai/)

------
WhiteNoiz3
Predictive text in your phone messaging app.

------
GorgeRonde
Google News

