7 ms·

Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta

174 points by blandinw 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ar7hur 10y ago
Hi everyone! I'm one of the cofounders. This is an early beta of our Bot Engine. We would love to get the community's feedback. Thanks!
- petr_tik 10y ago
  Hey Ar7hur, Awesome Bot Engine - thanks. 2 questions, if I can: 1. How much of an inspiration did the Telegram bot API make on your dev team? 2. What's the NLP back-end for it and what are your plans for duckling? I forked it a while ago and was going to add some languages I know - would that be useful? Thanks for an awesome product!
  - ar7hur 10y ago
    1. None, AFAIK their API is a way to send and receive messages, but does not provide automation. Am I wrong? 2. We use a combination of traditional NLP (CRF NER, maxent classifiers) and deep learning. The "old" stuff needs less data to be trained. We'll continue to support duckling, we always love PRs, please help us!
- devty 10y ago
  hey ar7hur - excited about the release. i've seen/heard that wit.ai likes to use clojure (lisp for AI programming? of course!). was clojure used to power Bot Engine? if so, how did your team like the experience?
  - ar7hur 10y ago
    Wit.ai (including Bot Engine) is 100% Clojure. Our Grand Master is Rich Hickey.
    - devty 10y ago
      impressive :). long live the master
  - blandinw 10y ago
    The team loves it. We're shipping features quickly and it integrates nicely with all the FB infrastructure (via Java). And of course, once you taste REPL-driven development.. you cannot go back :-)
    - devty 10y ago
      awesome!
  - devty 10y ago
    I was walking through the tutorial - noticed a bad hyperlink at the bottom of the page (https://wit.ai/docs/quickstart https://wit.ai/docs/quickstart) "recipes" (s/"https://wit.ai/recipes/"/"https://wit.ai/docs/recipes" https://wit.ai/recipes/"/"https://wit.ai/docs/recipes")
    - francis88 10y ago
      Thanks for reporting. Will be fixed soon
      - devty 10y ago
        lovely
- mintplant 10y ago
  I'm interested in this, but is there any info about pricing available yet?
  - untog 10y ago
    They used to have paid plans, but since being bought out by Facebook everything is free.
    - mintplant 10y ago
      Free for now or free "forever"?
nodesocket 10y ago
What would be a business use-case? For example, we heavily use Slack for ops notifications (PagerDuty, Datadog, Opbeat), is the hope that companies will adopt Facebook messenger like companies adopt Slack? Thanks for the insight.
- ar7hur 10y ago
  You can use Bot Engine to build a Slack bot too, it's not tied to Messenger in any way, there is a HTTPS API. Use cases on Messenger will probably be more around customer care or entertainment, news, etc.
fizzbatter 10y ago
Man, i really love wit.ai, one of the coolest projects i've worked with. Unfortunately, these days i'm becoming jaded to X as a Service. Things like hosting or databases as a service are quantifiable, i have an idea of how much effort it takes me to migrate away... but AI? Especially the cool AI flavored NLP that wit.ai offers - it's just too hard to migrate away from for me. With that said, i understand how hard doing this in a home baked way could be. I think i just won't be happy until we have repositories of standardized ai training sets or baked results (forgive any pseudo terms). It just feels like these days, using awesome AI services means cementing yourself into the service, and making their service stronger as you increase their datasets and training. As much as i really do love wit.ai, i just don't want to use these types of services unless my backs against a wall.
- blandinw 10y ago
  (cofounder of Wit.ai here) Thanks for your kind words :) I understand your concerns, here is my take. X as a service allows you to get X with a lot less efforts. It allows you to understand the problem and your needs by getting started quickly. Over time, if X as a service saved you enough time and you become successful, you can choose to develop an expertise in X and cut the dependency. Wit is also about building a community of developers and advancing the state of the art of NLP in apps. Once the bot engine matures a bit, we'll be focusing again on the community aspect of Wit and hopefully advance the field enough so that efforts like the standardization you mentioned are started.
  - tyre 10y ago
    Could you explain why it is in your best interest to do so? Unless your community-based efforts are focused on "built on Wit", you would be actively lowering the bar to entry. From a company standpoint, the commoditization of the GP's comment is directly counter to your incentives as a business.
    - trump2016chalk 10y ago
      That may be the case but then the onus will be on Wit.ai to evolve in their innovation and remain competitive/ relative. Right now they are offering something that requires less know how and has "better" performance for less time. That is arguably valuable now and if it stops becoming valuable, or anytime before then, they'll need to evolve.
mwcampbell 10y ago
How can users communicate with a Bot Engine bot? Since wit.ai is part of Facebook, I naturally wonder if these bots will be locked into the Facebook platform.
- blandinw 10y ago
  Bot Engine is not tied to the Facebook platform. It exposes an HTTPS API that you can use from anywhere. Slack, the command-line, Messenger, a VR app, etc. We don't make assumptions on your platform. https://wit.ai/docs/http/20160330#converse-link https://wit.ai/docs/http/20160330#converse-link
brandnewlow 10y ago
Anyone want to build a bot with me? I'm playing around with this and it looks really fun.
- jeromekjerome 10y ago
  Love to collaborate ...
kenpeltzer 10y ago
With the Messenger platform being opened up today as well, are there currently plans to provide some kind of boilerplate integration between the Messenger api and the wit.ai HTTP api? Been playing with the Bot Engine all day btw - great product so far :)
- patapizza 10y ago
  (Wit.ai engineer here) Thank you for the interest :-) We haven't released any examples showing an integration with Messenger Platform API. In the meantime, please refer to the Messenger Platform docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/quickstart https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/quic... If you have any feedback, please shoot!
melvinmt 10y ago
How can I test my own bot without using the API? Basically looking for something like this: https://wit.ai/Francis88/Internet%20of%20Things/eval?_t=856&q=hello https://wit.ai/Francis88/Internet%20of%20Things/eval?_t=856&...
- blandinw 10y ago
  We're actually working on it :-) The F8 rush took us a bit by surprise... Shipping soon! http://imgur.com/hjswrHT http://imgur.com/hjswrHT
  - phodo 10y ago
    Was it "rushed" because of Microsoft's bot announcement a couple of weeks ago? (not expecting an answer... ) :)
    - blandinw 10y ago
      No, it was rushed because F8 was getting close, we're a small team and we had ambitious goals in terms of features! We had planned to release the Bot Engine at F8 long before MSFT's announcement. If you ask me, F8 might have affected their timing more than the other way around ;-)
nl 10y ago
I really like the "deliberate overfitting of stories to make them behave like rules" approach. It's the kind of thing that sounds obvious as soon as you say it, but only comes from deep immersion in the problem space. I'm thinking of lots of other places I can use it too now - is there a name for this approach yet?
- ar7hur 10y ago
  Thanks Nick. No name yet, do you have a suggestion? Uberfitting? :)
  - nl 10y ago
    GVEEOM - Generalization Via Expanding and Ensembling Overfit Models? Can't say I love it though.
  - mycl 10y ago
    It's called case-based reasoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-based_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-based_reasoning).
dharma1 10y ago
Does this work together with a speech recognition/TTS API from Wit? My use case is a Unity3D VR app
alainchabat 10y ago
Hi! that's awesome! I started to play with it . I was wondering if there is any way to have predefined stories? I'm sure there is already a bunch of "weather" stories or "how are you" stories that must come over and over. I don't want to spend much time on it
alainchabat 10y ago
Hi, sorry to report a bug (or is it me missing anything?). I successfully created the first story. However, the second story (basic, just text) keeps failing. Wondering what I did wrong ? https://www.dropbox.com/s/32bly2hei8ehm1s/Screenshot%202016-04-13%2020.14.48.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/32bly2hei8ehm1s/Screenshot%202016-...
xumx 10y ago
So far my experience have been terrible. Worse experience than the previous version. It is difficult to understand how stories work. It doesn't fit well with the Facebook messenger platform. Lacks documentation and examples. There is no support for story branching, conditional flows, or intents. What is Merge supposed to do.. How is it possible for my server code to know what to merge the entity into context, without knowing the intent.

174 points by blandinw 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Hi everyone! I'm one of the cofounders. This is an early beta of our Bot Engine. We would love to get the community's feedback. Thanks!

petr_tik 10y ago
Hey Ar7hur, Awesome Bot Engine - thanks. 2 questions, if I can: 1. How much of an inspiration did the Telegram bot API make on your dev team? 2. What's the NLP back-end for it and what are your plans for duckling? I forked it a while ago and was going to add some languages I know - would that be useful? Thanks for an awesome product!
- ar7hur 10y ago
  1. None, AFAIK their API is a way to send and receive messages, but does not provide automation. Am I wrong? 2. We use a combination of traditional NLP (CRF NER, maxent classifiers) and deep learning. The "old" stuff needs less data to be trained. We'll continue to support duckling, we always love PRs, please help us!
devty 10y ago
hey ar7hur - excited about the release. i've seen/heard that wit.ai likes to use clojure (lisp for AI programming? of course!). was clojure used to power Bot Engine? if so, how did your team like the experience?
- ar7hur 10y ago
  Wit.ai (including Bot Engine) is 100% Clojure. Our Grand Master is Rich Hickey.
  - devty 10y ago
    impressive :). long live the master
- blandinw 10y ago
  The team loves it. We're shipping features quickly and it integrates nicely with all the FB infrastructure (via Java). And of course, once you taste REPL-driven development.. you cannot go back :-)
  - devty 10y ago
    awesome!
- devty 10y ago
  I was walking through the tutorial - noticed a bad hyperlink at the bottom of the page (https://wit.ai/docs/quickstart https://wit.ai/docs/quickstart) "recipes" (s/"https://wit.ai/recipes/"/"https://wit.ai/docs/recipes" https://wit.ai/recipes/"/"https://wit.ai/docs/recipes")
  - francis88 10y ago
    Thanks for reporting. Will be fixed soon
    - devty 10y ago
      lovely
mintplant 10y ago
I'm interested in this, but is there any info about pricing available yet?
- untog 10y ago
  They used to have paid plans, but since being bought out by Facebook everything is free.
  - mintplant 10y ago
    Free for now or free "forever"?

nodesocket 10y ago

What would be a business use-case? For example, we heavily use Slack for ops notifications (PagerDuty, Datadog, Opbeat), is the hope that companies will adopt Facebook messenger like companies adopt Slack? Thanks for the insight.

ar7hur 10y ago
You can use Bot Engine to build a Slack bot too, it's not tied to Messenger in any way, there is a HTTPS API. Use cases on Messenger will probably be more around customer care or entertainment, news, etc.

fizzbatter 10y ago

Man, i really love wit.ai, one of the coolest projects i've worked with. Unfortunately, these days i'm becoming jaded to X as a Service. Things like hosting or databases as a service are quantifiable, i have an idea of how much effort it takes me to migrate away... but AI? Especially the cool AI flavored NLP that wit.ai offers - it's just too hard to migrate away from for me. With that said, i understand how hard doing this in a home baked way could be. I think i just won't be happy until we have repositories of standardized ai training sets or baked results (forgive any pseudo terms). It just feels like these days, using awesome AI services means cementing yourself into the service, and making their service stronger as you increase their datasets and training. As much as i really do love wit.ai, i just don't want to use these types of services unless my backs against a wall.

blandinw 10y ago
(cofounder of Wit.ai here) Thanks for your kind words :) I understand your concerns, here is my take. X as a service allows you to get X with a lot less efforts. It allows you to understand the problem and your needs by getting started quickly. Over time, if X as a service saved you enough time and you become successful, you can choose to develop an expertise in X and cut the dependency. Wit is also about building a community of developers and advancing the state of the art of NLP in apps. Once the bot engine matures a bit, we'll be focusing again on the community aspect of Wit and hopefully advance the field enough so that efforts like the standardization you mentioned are started.
- tyre 10y ago
  Could you explain why it is in your best interest to do so? Unless your community-based efforts are focused on "built on Wit", you would be actively lowering the bar to entry. From a company standpoint, the commoditization of the GP's comment is directly counter to your incentives as a business.
  - trump2016chalk 10y ago
    That may be the case but then the onus will be on Wit.ai to evolve in their innovation and remain competitive/ relative. Right now they are offering something that requires less know how and has "better" performance for less time. That is arguably valuable now and if it stops becoming valuable, or anytime before then, they'll need to evolve.

mwcampbell 10y ago

How can users communicate with a Bot Engine bot? Since wit.ai is part of Facebook, I naturally wonder if these bots will be locked into the Facebook platform.

blandinw 10y ago
Bot Engine is not tied to the Facebook platform. It exposes an HTTPS API that you can use from anywhere. Slack, the command-line, Messenger, a VR app, etc. We don't make assumptions on your platform. https://wit.ai/docs/http/20160330#converse-link https://wit.ai/docs/http/20160330#converse-link

brandnewlow 10y ago

Anyone want to build a bot with me? I'm playing around with this and it looks really fun.

jeromekjerome 10y ago
Love to collaborate ...

kenpeltzer 10y ago

With the Messenger platform being opened up today as well, are there currently plans to provide some kind of boilerplate integration between the Messenger api and the wit.ai HTTP api? Been playing with the Bot Engine all day btw - great product so far :)

patapizza 10y ago
(Wit.ai engineer here) Thank you for the interest :-) We haven't released any examples showing an integration with Messenger Platform API. In the meantime, please refer to the Messenger Platform docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/quickstart https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/quic... If you have any feedback, please shoot!

melvinmt 10y ago

How can I test my own bot without using the API? Basically looking for something like this: https://wit.ai/Francis88/Internet%20of%20Things/eval?_t=856&q=hello https://wit.ai/Francis88/Internet%20of%20Things/eval?_t=856&...

blandinw 10y ago
We're actually working on it :-) The F8 rush took us a bit by surprise... Shipping soon! http://imgur.com/hjswrHT http://imgur.com/hjswrHT
- phodo 10y ago
  Was it "rushed" because of Microsoft's bot announcement a couple of weeks ago? (not expecting an answer... ) :)
  - blandinw 10y ago
    No, it was rushed because F8 was getting close, we're a small team and we had ambitious goals in terms of features! We had planned to release the Bot Engine at F8 long before MSFT's announcement. If you ask me, F8 might have affected their timing more than the other way around ;-)

nl 10y ago

I really like the "deliberate overfitting of stories to make them behave like rules" approach. It's the kind of thing that sounds obvious as soon as you say it, but only comes from deep immersion in the problem space. I'm thinking of lots of other places I can use it too now - is there a name for this approach yet?

ar7hur 10y ago
Thanks Nick. No name yet, do you have a suggestion? Uberfitting? :)
- nl 10y ago
  GVEEOM - Generalization Via Expanding and Ensembling Overfit Models? Can't say I love it though.
- mycl 10y ago
  It's called case-based reasoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-based_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-based_reasoning).

dharma1 10y ago

Does this work together with a speech recognition/TTS API from Wit? My use case is a Unity3D VR app

alainchabat 10y ago

Hi! that's awesome! I started to play with it . I was wondering if there is any way to have predefined stories? I'm sure there is already a bunch of "weather" stories or "how are you" stories that must come over and over. I don't want to spend much time on it

alainchabat 10y ago

Hi, sorry to report a bug (or is it me missing anything?). I successfully created the first story. However, the second story (basic, just text) keeps failing. Wondering what I did wrong ? https://www.dropbox.com/s/32bly2hei8ehm1s/Screenshot%202016-04-13%2020.14.48.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/32bly2hei8ehm1s/Screenshot%202016-...

xumx 10y ago

So far my experience have been terrible. Worse experience than the previous version. It is difficult to understand how stories work. It doesn't fit well with the Facebook messenger platform. Lacks documentation and examples. There is no support for story branching, conditional flows, or intents. What is Merge supposed to do.. How is it possible for my server code to know what to merge the entity into context, without knowing the intent.