So these guys just do queries right? Not full on dialogues that Siri supports, but rather the trivia questions that Siri can resolve using Wolfram Alpha (via Wolfram's own hand-constructed NLP tech)?
Not that this is bad, but it is pretty far away from a general natural language interface where you basically have a conversation with your app.
We are read-only, this is absolutely correct, hopefully the site's not misleading in that respect. We would absolutely _love_ long term to allow commands as well as queries, and become something akin to the Siri third-party API everyone wants (although we're not tackling speech anytime soon).
That said, what you call trivia questions, we call decision support, reporting, and other grown up things. :P
The title of this post was just misleading a bit. I didn't mean to use trivia as a pejorative, just this is how I call the whole "use data X to answer question Y" domain of NLP, which are fairly distinct from dialogue processing systems. You seem to be basically in competition with Wolfram Alpha, except you focus on custom structured data sources, but they seem to do something here also [1].
Yup, Wolfram are a scary competitor, EasyAsk too. In my head, we're targeting the lower-end of the market - potentially smaller data models, no consultancy face-time. We'll see how realistic that turns out to be.
Not that this is bad, but it is pretty far away from a general natural language interface where you basically have a conversation with your app.