
Wit.ai (YC W14) raises $3M seed round from Andreessen Horowitz - ar7hur
https://wit.ai/blog/2014/10/15/wit-ai-raises-seed-round-from-andreessen-horowitz
======
brandonb
Congrats on the round!

I'm curious how you differentiate yourself from the built-in speech APIs on
iOS and Android?
[https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Speech/Articles/RecognizeSpeech.html)
[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/Speech...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/SpeechRecognizer.html)
[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/Recogn...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/RecognizerIntent.html)

I'm a little biased (I used to work on the Google speech team), but it seems
very hard for a startup to compete on the basis of accuracy, and for wearables
like watches it's pretty clear both Google and Apple are putting third-party
APIs for voice interfaces (including command-like syntaxes) front-and-center.
A lot of earlier speech/NLP startups have struggled with this dynamic--
although an aggressive, well-executing team can get a year or so ahead of the
platform, if you do something too close its core competency, eventually
Google/Apple will build the same feature directly into the operating system,
and then you're stuck competing with a team of 100+ PhDs with a 1000x
distribution advantage. At least, that's what would give me hesitation about
building a speech/NLP API startup in 2014.

I also noticed you're running a conference on voice interfaces
([http://listen.ai/](http://listen.ai/)). I'm not sure if you're well-
connected to the speech folks at Google/Microsoft/Apple, but if you decide you
want somebody from Google to speak, I'd be happy to ping some of my former
colleagues on your behalf. Looking at the agenda, I think the areas where they
could provide coverage is the core technology--acoustic modeling, deep
learning, hotword detection, or embedded recognition.

~~~
ar7hur
Thanks for these excellent remarks.

We differentiate ourselves from the Android Speech API in several ways:

1) As a developer, with Google you have no way to customize the speech engine
by providing your language model. Wit.ai builds a specific, customized
configuration for each app. If your app is specific and you cannot tell Google
what kind of thing it should expect, accuracy will be bad especially in noisy
environments. Wit.ai builds a specific language model for each app
automatically and in real time (each time Wit.ai learns more examples about
your app, it's updated), and queries several speech engines in parallel. To do
that it uses not only your data, but also relevant data from the community.
This is the core of our value proposition and not something Google does
provide today.

2) Google keep their Natural Language Understanding layer (what translates
text to structured, actionable data) for themselves. Developers cannot access
this. They're left with free text, but they often need actionable data.

3) Wit.ai is cross-platform. We have SDKs for iOS, Android, Linux, etc. [1] or
you can just stream raw audio to our API. Android Speech API is just available
on Android (well, you could hack it and use it from elsewhere but you're not
supposed to, and you can be shut down anytime). More and more wearables and
smart devices will run Linux. For instance hundreds of developers use Wit.ai
on Raspberry Pi.

As for the Apple doc you linked, it's Mac only (no iOS) + it just recognizes a
few phrases you provide in advance. I think it's a very old API that's still
here :)

Regarding listen.ai, yes please we would love to have Google (especially Now)
there. We have the Siri founder, the top Cortana guy, the former CEO of
Nuance... but nobody from Google yet.

[1] [https://wit.ai/docs](https://wit.ai/docs)

~~~
ckrailo
Any chance listen.ai will either be livestreamed or videos made available
later (a la confreaks or similar)? I can't make it, but I'm super interested
in ALL of this and really, really want to learn.

~~~
rgawdzik
+1, also really interested.

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7Figures2Commas
A week ago Mark Suster wrote an interesting article about the definition of a
"seed round":

> If it looks like an A-round, smells like an A-round & tastes like an A-round
> … it’s an A-round. My personal definition? It is less about actual money and
> more about structure of your Cap Table. If you have raised $2-4 million from
> a bunch of high-net-worth individuals I simply don’t see it as an A-round.
> If you raised $2 million from two small seed funds I probably don’t either
> (although in the past I would have). But if you raised $3-5 million from
> well-known seed funds or from a VC and you’re asking for $8-10 million in
> your next round … that next round is a B-round no matter what we
> collectively decide to call it when we VCs fund you.

~~~
ar7hur
My personal definition of a seed round is a round where you don't give up any
board seat or special power to investors. After a seed round you should
basically work as usual (product, users, product, users, ... nothing else). By
this definition, our round qualifies as seed. Managing a board takes time and
energy and the more you can delay this, the better (from my experience).

That being said, this is a very subjective notion and everybody is free to
have their own.

------
otoburb
Congrats to the Wit.ai team! Not sure there are any other companies laser
focused like this (NLP + IoT).

@ar7hur The pricing page[1] shows that the Community (free) plan allows
unlimited queries, but the Starter plan is limited to 250 queries per day.

Did you mean that unlimited queries are still allowable to any open instances,
while the query limit is only restricted to the three private Wit instances?
If so, I recommend another footnote on your pricing page to clarify this
distinction.

[1] [https://wit.ai/pricing](https://wit.ai/pricing)

~~~
ar7hur
Yes open instances are free and unlimited. This is the cornerstone of our
approach: we want developers to work together and share their training data.
Natural Language is _very_ hard and we need to join forces to crack it.

Thanks for the feedback, we'll try to make this easier to understand on the
pricing page (yeah, natural language generation is hard for humans, too!)

~~~
otoburb
Awesome thanks! Also, the other ambiguity is whether the private instance
query limits are per instance, or total aggregate across all private
instances.

~~~
francis88
Great feedback again, the query limit is the total aggregate across all the
private instances of a user

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zytek
Fun fact: "Wit.ai" can be pronounced just like "Witaj" in Polish, which means
"Welcome/Hello". Dunno if this is intentional or even acknowledged by
founders. ;-)

~~~
smeyer
One of the founders is named Laurent Landowski. Could this be a Polish name?
Polish also looks to be in beta for them, which is one of only a handful of
languages they support.

~~~
warrenmcwin
I've met him -- he and three other members of the team are French!

~~~
smeyer
I guess the Laurent should have given that away, but I figured "Landowski"
sounded a bit Polish.

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chambo622
Wow, congrats on the round! Looks like an amazing service. Will be trying it
soon for a project I'm working on, Android speech APIs aren't quite cutting
it.

Can this be run continuously from a Service on Android? Didn't see a mention
of it in your docs, but I've yet to play with it.

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Jonovono
Nice! I have been telling everyone since I found out about Wit several months
ago how awesome it is. Excited to see what they offer in the future!

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ssteinb
Amazing. Perfect example of when Peter Thiel says that the best investments
are in companies not easily categorized. That test works here imo

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kolencherry
The guys at Wit are awesome and are a great group to work with. Definitely
glad to see them raise that round. Congrats!

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danieldelouya
Congrats! Great job!

