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Show HN: mail2brain, email attachment timesaver
- mgkimsal 16y agoInteresting idea. Wondering A) how this is done (mturk?) and B) how this will be monetized.
- jamesbowman 16y agoYes, mturk is the backend. Amazon links can monetize it.
- Robin_Message 16y agoIf mturk is the back end, you need to tell users that a human will listen to their voicemail and look at their stuff. I assumed you had voice recognition software and clever image stuff, not random humans. The privacy issues of this are horrid; at least make it obvious what will happen.
- jamesbowman 16y agoYes, you are right. How about a strap line across the bottom: "Powered by Mechanical Turk: humans write these answers"
- mattmillr 16y agoI'd put it at the top: Email an attachment to go@mail2brain.com and a human will turn it into something useful: Frame it as a feature :)
- chime 16y agoEmail an attachment to go@mail2brain.com and a real person will turn it into something useful
- almost 16y agoVery much so! It would also stop people from emailing something then assuming it's broken when they don't get a reply a few seconds later.
- dreur 16y agoBetter explanation would be great, still wondering what it does - What is the common use case ?
- mattmillr 16y agoI like the visual representation of what the service does, but the images are small. The result images are essentially your product, but they're cropped too much.
- hazmattron 16y agoPotential application: a user with a camera phone that doesn't have support for barcode reader applications (not Android, iOS, etc) but can send an email with a photo attachment could analyze a barcode with this service. But here the lack of immediacy might be an issue...
- jasonlbaptiste 16y agoI really really like it, but I can see this getting very expensive, very fast.
- jamesbowman 16y agoCommon use cases: transcribing voicemails from emails. finding products for shopping without having to do the search yourself.
- mattmillr 16y agoI understand these use cases, but I'm not sure the attachments related to these things are already in my email frequently enough for this to be useful. My voicemail is on my cellphone or in Google voice (where it already has a humorous machine translation that might be good enough.) If I want to take a picture of a product, the closest camera is in my phone and there's already an Amazon app for that. Perhaps you could de-emphasize the "attachment" part, which makes me think of files and serious emailing, and emphasize "send a picture" which I can do quickly from my phone. I know it's the same thing, but the different wordings send my brain in different directions.
- almost 16y agoKitchen Towels are not the most exciting of demo images :)
- endlessvoid94 16y agothis is fantastic. good idea.
- ydant 16y agoAre you aware that the Amazon app for Android / iPhone already does the product lookup / barcode scanning ("by humans") for you?
- Zak 16y ago"How did we do" should allow for comments. I rated a response "ok" but would have preferred to be able to explain that it was good that the source of the image was identified, but bad that the associated product was not.
- hristov 16y agoNow that you have made it clear that humans will see each message get ready for a torrent of penis photos. Some times I feel bad for the mechanical turkers.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ComputerGuru 16y agoCan this scale? The problem with mturk is you can't make any QoS guarantees.
- wa0 16y agomail2brain.com took 6 minutes to identify the product Product: Spiderman Link: http://mail2brain.com/static/f00dba0fe1218b1f9b5becd0483e869529ff92c8_full.jpg http://mail2brain.com/static/f00dba0fe1218b1f9b5becd0483e869... Well, heavy heavy cool frontend for mturk :)