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These are my fears too. I've been looking at this over the weekend as a possibility to embed a 'bot like feature into my web app, but I would hate my users to g

These are my fears too. I've been looking at this over the weekend as a possibility to embed a 'bot like feature into my web app, but I would hate my users to get used to it, then have Wit go away like Parse did. Much harder to develop an AI engine from scratch myself than an authentication/database engine.

aibottle 10y ago
Exactly, Parse was a great example. Rather basic service and the outcry was huge. NLP is way harder and maybe even impossible for most developers. But I'm optimistic, that something like wit.ai could be done in an opensource community-driven environment. Projects like SpaCy[0] make NLP easier to use for more developers. [0] https://spacy.io/ https://spacy.io/
hellcow 10y ago
Give Abot a look (https://github.com/itsabot/abot https://github.com/itsabot/abot). It's an MIT-licensed bot framework, and it should do everything you need. Would love your feedback as well--email's in my profile.
HillRat 10y ago
As far as I've seen, this isn't anything you couldn't do with basic classification and NER passes in OpenNLP. Straightforward, even trivial, stuff as far as existing NLP toolsets go.
- deleted 10y ago
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- deet 10y ago
  Wit seems to be heading towards more conversation-oriented (ie multi-message) approach to NLP which is something existing NLP toolsets don't make straightforward. For example, predicting the next action a bot should take based on conversation history is a bit different than just classifying an utterance. There are hints at how to do this in literature, and Init.ai (disclaimer: I work there) is working on it as well, but it's not widespread. There's also more to this type of slot filling than just NER. Again, the necessary techniques are available in academic literature, but not necessarily turn key. Plus, you need to handle parsing after locating the slots. For the parsing, you can take a look at Duckling (https://duckling.wit.ai/ https://duckling.wit.ai/) which Wit did open source. Both on the classification front and the slot filling, open source toolkits might get you part of the way there but not all the way. Having a training and management UI is also a substantial value add once you use it.
- nl 10y ago
  The voice recognition isn't basic. The Open Source equivalents are no where near as good, unfortunately.

aibottle 10y ago

Exactly, Parse was a great example. Rather basic service and the outcry was huge. NLP is way harder and maybe even impossible for most developers. But I'm optimistic, that something like wit.ai could be done in an opensource community-driven environment. Projects like SpaCy[0] make NLP easier to use for more developers. [0] https://spacy.io/ https://spacy.io/

hellcow 10y ago

Give Abot a look (https://github.com/itsabot/abot https://github.com/itsabot/abot). It's an MIT-licensed bot framework, and it should do everything you need. Would love your feedback as well--email's in my profile.

HillRat 10y ago

As far as I've seen, this isn't anything you couldn't do with basic classification and NER passes in OpenNLP. Straightforward, even trivial, stuff as far as existing NLP toolsets go.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deet 10y ago
Wit seems to be heading towards more conversation-oriented (ie multi-message) approach to NLP which is something existing NLP toolsets don't make straightforward. For example, predicting the next action a bot should take based on conversation history is a bit different than just classifying an utterance. There are hints at how to do this in literature, and Init.ai (disclaimer: I work there) is working on it as well, but it's not widespread. There's also more to this type of slot filling than just NER. Again, the necessary techniques are available in academic literature, but not necessarily turn key. Plus, you need to handle parsing after locating the slots. For the parsing, you can take a look at Duckling (https://duckling.wit.ai/ https://duckling.wit.ai/) which Wit did open source. Both on the classification front and the slot filling, open source toolkits might get you part of the way there but not all the way. Having a training and management UI is also a substantial value add once you use it.
nl 10y ago
The voice recognition isn't basic. The Open Source equivalents are no where near as good, unfortunately.