
Wit.ai (YC W14) Is Joining Facebook - ar7hur
https://wit.ai/blog/2015/01/05/wit-ai-facebook
======
Karunamon
_The platform will remain open and become entirely free for everyone._

A nice model, this. Facebook gets a huge corpus of semantic data from the
users of the app, and everyone else gets an ever-more-sophisticated classifier
for their commands.

That's a win/win for everyone. Well done and congrats!

~~~
objclxt
Maybe I'm cynical, but talk is cheap. I remember when Facebook bought
face.com. From the face.com blogpost announcing it:

> "we love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer
> community.”

...the API was shut down some time later. I would dispute the claim the
developer community was supported as a result of that deal. A blog post saying
the platform will remain open isn't a commitment, it's a vague, hand wavy
promise.

~~~
Karunamon
The reason I don't think that will happen here is Wit's pricing model - it's
completely gratis to use, with the proviso that your commands and associations
are public. You cough up cash if want that to remain private.

As long as new users are using Wit, Facebook continues to get value from the
product. Closing it down wouldn't gain them much.

~~~
deet
Wit sent this email to customers today:

    
    
      - If you have a paying subscription, you won’t be charged again and your instance(s) will remain private.
      - Your open instance(s) will remain open
      - If you have open instance(s) that you want to make private (for free), please wait for a few days until we roll out this feature.
    

I'm a paying customer and had plans to pay them significantly more (I am
building an app that will be released in a few months that will heavily rely
on it). Personally I'd rather see it stay a paid service since I want an SLA
and support.

That said, Wit.ai is a great service, the team is friendly and responsive, and
I congratulate them.

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p4bl0
A friend of mine's reaction, quoting bits of the linked post:

    
    
        <Mc> 18 months ago, we started Wit.ai with the vision that no solution is to
             be found in a closed, centralized, managed approach.
        <Mc> That is where today’s big news comes in: Wit.ai is joining Facebook!

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yoda_sl
I wasn't aware of Wit.ai until today's news... but now after checking out
their web site and API, it will be probably a great addition of their API to
Parse.com! Potentially some killer features can come up by combining both
systems... Siri on steroid with cross platform solution! ouch!

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michaelbuckbee
Pure speculation here, but it doesn't seem crazy to think that this is in part
for use by the Oculus team. While voice commands are a nice to have on current
mobile phones - they are likely to be a much bigger deal for head mounted
displays.

~~~
dysfunction
This acquisition actually makes a lot more sense to me than Facebook buying
Oculus. Oculus' ostensible business model was selling hardware to users, which
is totally orthogonal to Facebook's business model of selling users to
advertisers. IMO there's absolutely no way Facebook bought Oculus just to get
the revenue from selling Oculus hardware, but I still don't see what their
plan would be for integrating that hardware into their existing business
model. I can _definitely_ see how a natural-language API would fit in.

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securingsincity
Wit.ai is a great service and it is great news Facebook will be keeping them
open. Would be a great fit for some of their other dev services like Parse. I
built an app that took some users voice commands and pokes fun at the users
crudely and it took so little time to build because of Wit.ai.

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jathu
Congrats to the Wit.ai team! For once I'm glad it was facebook who acquired
them. I've been truly happy with Parse and can only begin to wonder how
facebook will integrate all the developer tools they are acquiring.

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mtrimpe
Congratulations on the acquisition!

I'm assuming that puts an end to my dreams of Wit.ai supporting device-local
voice recognition with context-limited vocabularies to drive user interfaces
though...

~~~
pavlov
_... device-local voice recognition with context-limited vocabularies to drive
user interfaces_

That would be really interesting to me as well. Do you know of any other
project or startup working on that?

Similar to the OpenCV library for computer vision, I wish there were an
"OpenVC" for voice control.

~~~
dnr
I found pocketsphinx pretty easy to work with. I use it for command voice
recognition for home automation stuff. It's even pretty accurate when using
limited vocabulary models, after some tweaking. There are python bindings,
though they lag behind the C api slightly, and even the C api is well-
commented and the code is clean.

~~~
frik
Do you have a write-up/blog post or article about pocketsphinx? How do you
create/train the vocabulary models? If you use Text-to-speech too (CMU Flite,
eSpeak), maybe you know some good resources there as well?

~~~
dnr
I haven't written anything up yet. To summarize, I use the standard acoustic
model (hub4wsj_sc_8k) with a combination of keyword activation and a fixed
grammar (in jsgf format). It's normally listening for a wakeup keyword, and
when it find one, switches into grammar mode until it hears a complete
utterance, or times out, then switches back to keyword mode. It works pretty
well, though tuning the keyword sensitivity is annoying.

The pocketsphinx-specific code is actually quite simple:

[https://bitbucket.org/davidn/dom/src/default/listen/listen.c](https://bitbucket.org/davidn/dom/src/default/listen/listen.c)

You can see the keyword and jsgf files in that directory, for reference. The
pronunciation dictionary is generated from one of the standard dictionaries,
selecting just the works present in the grammar.

Note: If you look in the whole directory, there's a mix of decent code and
ugly hacks in there, and I didn't make any attempt at making it customizable.
It's just for me. Btw, it all runs on a raspberry pi.

~~~
frik
Thanks!

Btw. their probabilistic parser ([http://goo.gl/rRdRx4](http://goo.gl/rRdRx4))
might be useful for your project: "wake me up the first Friday of February
2014 at 7am"

Great to hear that RaspberryPi (and Python) is fast enough for it.

------
jayp
Congratulations to the Wit.ai team.

I was never a user, but when I checked them out, did think their offering
showed great promise. I suppose the offer from Facebook must've been too good
to say no.

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lars_francke
Hadn't heard of wit.ai before. Seems very nice. One huge thing missing from
the site is any information about supported languages. Still don't know....

~~~
canadev
Agreed with the first part. Never heard of it, looks cool.

As for the second, I disagree: [https://wit.ai/docs](https://wit.ai/docs)

~~~
lars_francke
I don't mean programming language but things like English, German, Mandarin
etc.

~~~
canadev
Ah. I totally missed that.

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joeblau
Congrats to the team. I had high hopes that this would become a self
sustaining product. Hopefully you guys get to continue this work at Facebook.

------
steveklabnik
This may be the first company that's had Rust code in production get aquired:
[https://wit.ai/docs/rust/1.0.0/quickstart](https://wit.ai/docs/rust/1.0.0/quickstart)

I mean, it's obviously a small part, there's absolutely no way I'd suggest
Rust was a part of that, just a minor point of trivia. :)

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puredanger
Nice to see another Clojure company succeeding!

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dbish
Always loved their interface. I'm interested to see if Facebook will make it
easy for the tech to be shared with their Oculus developers as well to create
VR agents or controls that are easy to interact with via voice.

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Breefield
Was just telling a non-tech friend about Wit. Try, explaining NLP and
classifiers to someone who isn't quite sure what dictation is, made for a
quick ride up the chair lift at Kirkwood.

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perrylaj
Congrats to Wit, though I can't help but be a little saddened that the self-
hosted/embedded licensing may be less likely to roll out as a result. I've
been playing with the platform and could definitely find some use, but most of
our target market is unlikely to accept cloud based services, especially those
associated with data-mining organizations. Fingers crossed that such
licenses/installations are still on the roadmap.

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jscheel
I love wit.ai. Really hope Facebook isn't just blowing smoke about keeping
them open.

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lowglow
These Wi.AI t-shirts I have are now a collector's item!

~~~
dnautics
Startup tee shirts as a "poor man's equity scheme".

~~~
bduerst
And here I thought they were a currency.

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ilyaeck
Congrats Alex and team!

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devniel
congrats

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pmalynin
Our incredible journey.

~~~
jewel
I don't think that's a fair label in this case since they are keeping the
product. For context, the blog at
[http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com)
highlights the contradiction when an acquisition announcement is filled with
flowery language about the adventure of building the product and other
excitement while simultaneously shuttering the product.

Obviously everyone has the right to shut down their products, but it'd be nice
if they said "We are sorry that we are going to be unable to continue offering
this service".

~~~
JetSpiegel
Just wait a few months

------
ma2xd
rip

