9 ms·

Show HN: Launching Struct – Knowledge-Rich, AI-Powered Chat Platform

59 points by mrjn 3y ago

da39a3ee 3y ago
I really like the writing in the intro, but having "Horrible Search (of Slack)" as the first item in the justification for the entire product is a really bad idea and seriously weakens the argument. The trouble is that, even though you may be able to point to ways it could be better, in absolute terms it is incredibly useful. The last two companies I've worked at use Slack, so what I'm saying is based on something like 8 years of daily experience. Searching internal company Slack history is a fantastically effective way to retrieve information about other people who have confronted a problem similar to that which you are confronting today. Yes, I absolutely agree that they're black holes in the sense that information that could go on the permanent public record is available only to a few, and then lost forever. But the problem there isn't search, so search shouldn't be the first item in your product manifesto.
sudhishkr 3y ago
This is great @mrjn. I can tell you from my experience, that this will save people a lot of time by reducing transcribing efforts and facilitating faster lookups. A few questions (haven't tried the product yet) - Is it possible for the bot to summarize on slack, and drop a link to your UI? - does the bot have query / search capability through directly from slack? hopping into another UI at times can make it a poor experience ^ give your product roadmap, I am guessing this may not be on top of your list - how does your bot know when a discussion thread has ended? Is the AI generation more a batch model today? - also does the bot handle merging two threads sharing similar context? A few use-cases I believe this can solve right away - [more from engineering side] often times runbooks/dev solutions for issues can be generated from such discussions/threads. Your tool looks very promising to generate runbooks from slack threads. This kind of fits somewhere inbetween messaging-apps, stackoverflow & documentations (which is how I would use it atleast).
- mrjn 3y ago
  Hey! 1. I'm working on adding Slack commands to the bot, so you can search, and even directly ask questions off the bot from within Slack. You're right that the need to switch to another website to find information is annoying -- in fact, that's where the full Struct Platform would be of incredible help -- one platform for chat and knowledge capture. 2. We sync the conversations every few hours. At that point, if there was some new chats in a conversation, we re-run the AI. So, it updates the title and summary according to the sum of all the chats the thread has so far. The bot doesn't, but in Struct, we'd allow for a way to merge threads which are similar, or fork a thread which has deviated from the main topic. For engineering, even sales and marketing, this would be amazing! I can think of so many use cases there -- for example, every GitHub issue, every sales deal, every customer issue, all could be threads in Struct, allowing easy communication with all the context readily available. The possiblities are VERY exciting! :-)
jerriclynsjohn 3y ago
This is just brilliant, ability to resurface knowledge from conversation is epic especially the AI based summarisation of threads can really help communities expose lost knowledge from conversations and from my experience there is too much knowledge getting lost in conversations.
mrjn 3y ago
I'm excited to announce the launch of Struct.AI -- a knowledge-rich, AI-powered chat platform. Chat platforms today are inherently broken. Slack and Discord, the most commonly used chat platforms, while useful for real-time communication, create knowledge black holes, hindering the effective storage and retrieval of information. I have thought about this problem for the past 5 years -- and arrived at a set of principles the ideal chat platform should aspire towards. And I've formulated all that into, what I call, the CRISPY framework. I'm thrilled to introduce Struct -- a new, innovative chat platform fully embodying this framework. Struct challenges the status quo, turning real-time communication into accessible, lasting knowledge and reinventing chat as we know it.
- cloudking 3y ago
  No screenshots?
  - mrjn 3y ago
    Plenty of live examples though in the "Struct has Amazing Users" section, and on the website.
    - SkyPuncher 3y ago
      As feedback, you need them directly in the article. As someone being dropped in from HN, I know nothing about your product and I'm not inclined to try to navigate. I need that content directly in front of me, with this article, if you want me to have any chance of seeing it. Most blogs don't actually link back to the main marketing site (which is always a fail), so I've just stopped trying to navigate to other content.
      - mrjn 3y ago
        Good point. Added a screenshot from Typesense Knowledge Base powered by Struct. Thanks!
haxzie 3y ago
Slack and Discord aren't built to handle knowledge. It's surprising how much of contextual knowledge is lost in ever ending threads and chats. Hope Struct changes that.
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  Chat is not meant to handle knowledge, that's it. Trying to shoehorn it in will only end-up in catastrophic failure. The comparison shown in this very article should have led to the obvious conclusion that instead of trying to make chat suitable to knowledge-sharing, they should have made forums suitable for instant messaging.
  - RadiozRadioz 3y ago
    I agree that chat is not meant to handle knowledge, but I don't think a forum is the right approach either. What people probably want is a proper centralized knowledgebase like a wiki. Personally, I'm happy for my chat app to be good at ephemeral instant communication, my forum to be good at longer-form async discussion, and my wiki to be good as a searchable read-heavy knowledgebase.
  - mrjn 3y ago
    The issue is -- every email / forum platform which has tried to make IMs available within the platform has failed. Real-time, short-form interactions v/s async, long-form interactions is too wide of gap to bridge under one platform.
ttul 3y ago
Interested to know how you plan to build a moat against Slack and Microsoft who are both building their own GPT-based systems to help manage chat-bloat.
- mrjn 3y ago
  AI is helpful for Struct, but 5 out of 6 core principles for Struct go well beyond AI. Slack and other existing chat platforms score 1.5 out of 6 on CRISPY. Emails and forums score 4.5/6 -- Struct is designed to score 6/6. In fact, my thoughts on AI are that it would become a commodity. Every product would have AI -- so it would become tablestakes. It can't be the differentiating factor in the long term.
jabo 3y ago
We've been using Struct's Slack bot in Typesense's Slack community here (if you want to see a demo of how it looks): https://threads.typesense.org/kb https://threads.typesense.org/kb I love that the discussions we're having (in public channels) are now automatically indexed and made searchable publicly to any users who are looking for information on Google, etc, even if they're not a part of our Slack community. I previously used to be worried about all this time and effort we're putting in to a walled garden of information that Slack was becoming, not to mention their untenable pricing for communities. I now find myself spending more time writing more detailed answers in Slack, because I know it's going to be available publicly for future searchers.
vzaliva 3y ago
When organization starts using struct it will entrust you with a lot of confidential information. Assuming you also feed it to OpenAI the question arises on how it is protected. The privacy policy seems to written for an individual user. As organization admin I would like to see a privacy and information security policy for whole organization enrolling in struct.ai.
- mrjn 3y ago
  "OpenAI will not use data submitted by customers via our API to train or improve our models ... Any data sent through the API will be retained for abuse and misuse monitoring purposes for a maximum of 30 days, after which it will be deleted (unless otherwise required by law)." https://openai.com/policies/api-data-usage-policies https://openai.com/policies/api-data-usage-policies
vzaliva 3y ago
It is unclear how it deals with private channles. On our Discord server some channels have limited access and information from them should not leak outside the list of members.
- mrjn 3y ago
  Right now, it only picks up public channels, because the Knowledge Base generated is accessible to public (so be careful -- do not add the bot in private channels). But, we are very close to supporting access control, so the content would be private. And only the folks who're logged in, would be able to see it.
alfredm 3y ago
Interesting framing, I appreciate your perspectives on knowledge in chat platforms. I've been looking at AI-powered searches over internal chats (such as Slack) myself recently. However, I do have to wonder a few things. Did you do much research on competitors when coming up with 'scores' for them against your framework? You define > Contextual Clarity: Each conversation should have a defined title and summary for immediate understanding. And then for both Slack and Discord you give: > Contextual Clarity | 0 | Bad. Must read each message to understand if it's relevant. Despite the fact that Discord's threads are literally given defined titles (and indeed there's a whole forum style channel approach that is literally thread-first as Struct claims to be). I'd also argue that Slack threads are focused around one initial message which gives a fair amount of context to it, they aren't on their own. Similarly you define: > Isolation: Enable clear separation of concurrent conversations to maintain focus and avoid confusion. Giving both products a 0 again: > Isolation | 0 | Bad. Channel level isolation is too broad. Even though both products have threads (not just channels) which are heavily used, and as mentioned Discord has given an entirely new channel type "Forum Channels" Now, I know you come back to some of those points later on in the post (after giving a score that, in my opinion, is very misleading). > Lately, Slack and Discord, have both added threads to allow some level of isolation. But, to achieve that, they had to break away from what made them special -- the liveness of conversations. I mean, Slack has had threads for years and years, and Discord's aren't that new either. You then say that these break away from liveness of conversations and reduces them to numbers, and yet that seems to be what Struct does for every single conversation? I appreciate this framework is very loose and you're trying to make a point to sell your product and way of thinking, but I find it difficult to trust you when you pose analyses such as these. --------- However, despite all of the above, the thing I am most concerned about is your pricing. You're trying to sell it as "innovative" when you are literally charging $0.13 per thread, per month. The entire point of realtime chat-based applications like Slack and Discord is to facilitate fast moving, frequent conversation, rather than the slow responses of forums and emails. If Slack was constrained to being thread-first, you'd likely see tens to hundreds of threads a day for a tiny company, let alone a giant one. I'd love to see if you're willing to post some estimates as to how much you expect your early customers' monthly bills to end up as. This feels extortionately expensive. (And just in case you think I missed it, I did read about "intelligently" forgetting threads but that feels so hand-wavy I don't even know how to address it, and part of having the history of something like Slack is that you can realise later on that you need information you previously said, even if you didn't think it important at the time).
audessuscest 3y ago
you can't add private channels so I can't really test it
- mrjn 3y ago
  That’s the next thing we are working on. Support for private channels.
ricklamers 3y ago
The unlock opportunity here is likely being underestimated. I heard once "you can be ahead of so many curves by being on Twitter", now add Discord and Slack. Also, you can remove the tediousness of Twitter feed scrolling because AI will make it easy to just ask for specific knowledge (if you know what you're looking for) or perform discovery based searching (what are some of the interesting ways in which people are using LangChain in this community). This is wild!
maxwell201922 3y ago
This looks like an exciting launch. We see so many pain points with Slack internally at Nutanix. We will signup for this. Excited to test the features!
pranay01 3y ago
We've been using Struct for SigNoz slack community. Here's how it looks https://knowledgebase.signoz.io/kb https://knowledgebase.signoz.io/kb Since, our community is so active, it helps a lot to have a tool like Struct to summarise discussions and have it for future reference.
anish_m 3y ago
Love the idea, and looking forward to using it. The unfortunate thing with slack and discord is that most of them are behind public search, and there is so much of lost wisdom for communities.
advaitruia 3y ago
Happy user here of the newly launched Discord integration :)
fidla 3y ago
$37 a month
ZeroCool2u 3y ago
This is a really cool idea and something I'd love to use, especially on large discord servers. Something that happened to me just yesterday was a friend of mine and I were trying to play a newly released game together and he was having a difficult to debug issue. The game is extremely popular and the dev team is literally 3 or 4 people. The main support channel is just a discord server, but that's incredibly hard to search for information about bugs and how people fix them. This is exactly the kind of thing I'd love to see added to the server, so that finding the information in the massive chat channels I needed was easier and could be distributed to others. If any Struct folks are around, the game is called BattleBit. The devs might be happy to hear from you!
- mrjn 3y ago
  Perhaps you could ask the devs nicely to install Struct Bot in their Discord server. I'm sure it would help the entire community to have a knowledge base.
  - ZeroCool2u 3y ago
    I have already, but my broader point was that this seems like a really common use case that could help with adoption and growth.
    - mrjn 3y ago
      Strong Agree!

59 points by mrjn 3y ago

I really like the writing in the intro, but having "Horrible Search (of Slack)" as the first item in the justification for the entire product is a really bad idea and seriously weakens the argument. The trouble is that, even though you may be able to point to ways it could be better, in absolute terms it is incredibly useful. The last two companies I've worked at use Slack, so what I'm saying is based on something like 8 years of daily experience. Searching internal company Slack history is a fantastically effective way to retrieve information about other people who have confronted a problem similar to that which you are confronting today. Yes, I absolutely agree that they're black holes in the sense that information that could go on the permanent public record is available only to a few, and then lost forever. But the problem there isn't search, so search shouldn't be the first item in your product manifesto.

sudhishkr 3y ago

This is great @mrjn. I can tell you from my experience, that this will save people a lot of time by reducing transcribing efforts and facilitating faster lookups. A few questions (haven't tried the product yet) - Is it possible for the bot to summarize on slack, and drop a link to your UI? - does the bot have query / search capability through directly from slack? hopping into another UI at times can make it a poor experience ^ give your product roadmap, I am guessing this may not be on top of your list - how does your bot know when a discussion thread has ended? Is the AI generation more a batch model today? - also does the bot handle merging two threads sharing similar context? A few use-cases I believe this can solve right away - [more from engineering side] often times runbooks/dev solutions for issues can be generated from such discussions/threads. Your tool looks very promising to generate runbooks from slack threads. This kind of fits somewhere inbetween messaging-apps, stackoverflow & documentations (which is how I would use it atleast).

mrjn 3y ago
Hey! 1. I'm working on adding Slack commands to the bot, so you can search, and even directly ask questions off the bot from within Slack. You're right that the need to switch to another website to find information is annoying -- in fact, that's where the full Struct Platform would be of incredible help -- one platform for chat and knowledge capture. 2. We sync the conversations every few hours. At that point, if there was some new chats in a conversation, we re-run the AI. So, it updates the title and summary according to the sum of all the chats the thread has so far. The bot doesn't, but in Struct, we'd allow for a way to merge threads which are similar, or fork a thread which has deviated from the main topic. For engineering, even sales and marketing, this would be amazing! I can think of so many use cases there -- for example, every GitHub issue, every sales deal, every customer issue, all could be threads in Struct, allowing easy communication with all the context readily available. The possiblities are VERY exciting! :-)

jerriclynsjohn 3y ago

This is just brilliant, ability to resurface knowledge from conversation is epic especially the AI based summarisation of threads can really help communities expose lost knowledge from conversations and from my experience there is too much knowledge getting lost in conversations.

mrjn 3y ago

I'm excited to announce the launch of Struct.AI -- a knowledge-rich, AI-powered chat platform. Chat platforms today are inherently broken. Slack and Discord, the most commonly used chat platforms, while useful for real-time communication, create knowledge black holes, hindering the effective storage and retrieval of information. I have thought about this problem for the past 5 years -- and arrived at a set of principles the ideal chat platform should aspire towards. And I've formulated all that into, what I call, the CRISPY framework. I'm thrilled to introduce Struct -- a new, innovative chat platform fully embodying this framework. Struct challenges the status quo, turning real-time communication into accessible, lasting knowledge and reinventing chat as we know it.

cloudking 3y ago
No screenshots?
- mrjn 3y ago
  Plenty of live examples though in the "Struct has Amazing Users" section, and on the website.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    As feedback, you need them directly in the article. As someone being dropped in from HN, I know nothing about your product and I'm not inclined to try to navigate. I need that content directly in front of me, with this article, if you want me to have any chance of seeing it. Most blogs don't actually link back to the main marketing site (which is always a fail), so I've just stopped trying to navigate to other content.
    - mrjn 3y ago
      Good point. Added a screenshot from Typesense Knowledge Base powered by Struct. Thanks!

haxzie 3y ago

Slack and Discord aren't built to handle knowledge. It's surprising how much of contextual knowledge is lost in ever ending threads and chats. Hope Struct changes that.

iLoveOncall 3y ago
Chat is not meant to handle knowledge, that's it. Trying to shoehorn it in will only end-up in catastrophic failure. The comparison shown in this very article should have led to the obvious conclusion that instead of trying to make chat suitable to knowledge-sharing, they should have made forums suitable for instant messaging.
- RadiozRadioz 3y ago
  I agree that chat is not meant to handle knowledge, but I don't think a forum is the right approach either. What people probably want is a proper centralized knowledgebase like a wiki. Personally, I'm happy for my chat app to be good at ephemeral instant communication, my forum to be good at longer-form async discussion, and my wiki to be good as a searchable read-heavy knowledgebase.
- mrjn 3y ago
  The issue is -- every email / forum platform which has tried to make IMs available within the platform has failed. Real-time, short-form interactions v/s async, long-form interactions is too wide of gap to bridge under one platform.

ttul 3y ago

Interested to know how you plan to build a moat against Slack and Microsoft who are both building their own GPT-based systems to help manage chat-bloat.

mrjn 3y ago
AI is helpful for Struct, but 5 out of 6 core principles for Struct go well beyond AI. Slack and other existing chat platforms score 1.5 out of 6 on CRISPY. Emails and forums score 4.5/6 -- Struct is designed to score 6/6. In fact, my thoughts on AI are that it would become a commodity. Every product would have AI -- so it would become tablestakes. It can't be the differentiating factor in the long term.

jabo 3y ago

We've been using Struct's Slack bot in Typesense's Slack community here (if you want to see a demo of how it looks): https://threads.typesense.org/kb https://threads.typesense.org/kb I love that the discussions we're having (in public channels) are now automatically indexed and made searchable publicly to any users who are looking for information on Google, etc, even if they're not a part of our Slack community. I previously used to be worried about all this time and effort we're putting in to a walled garden of information that Slack was becoming, not to mention their untenable pricing for communities. I now find myself spending more time writing more detailed answers in Slack, because I know it's going to be available publicly for future searchers.

vzaliva 3y ago

When organization starts using struct it will entrust you with a lot of confidential information. Assuming you also feed it to OpenAI the question arises on how it is protected. The privacy policy seems to written for an individual user. As organization admin I would like to see a privacy and information security policy for whole organization enrolling in struct.ai.

mrjn 3y ago
"OpenAI will not use data submitted by customers via our API to train or improve our models ... Any data sent through the API will be retained for abuse and misuse monitoring purposes for a maximum of 30 days, after which it will be deleted (unless otherwise required by law)." https://openai.com/policies/api-data-usage-policies https://openai.com/policies/api-data-usage-policies

vzaliva 3y ago

It is unclear how it deals with private channles. On our Discord server some channels have limited access and information from them should not leak outside the list of members.

mrjn 3y ago
Right now, it only picks up public channels, because the Knowledge Base generated is accessible to public (so be careful -- do not add the bot in private channels). But, we are very close to supporting access control, so the content would be private. And only the folks who're logged in, would be able to see it.

alfredm 3y ago

Interesting framing, I appreciate your perspectives on knowledge in chat platforms. I've been looking at AI-powered searches over internal chats (such as Slack) myself recently. However, I do have to wonder a few things. Did you do much research on competitors when coming up with 'scores' for them against your framework? You define > Contextual Clarity: Each conversation should have a defined title and summary for immediate understanding. And then for both Slack and Discord you give: > Contextual Clarity | 0 | Bad. Must read each message to understand if it's relevant. Despite the fact that Discord's threads are literally given defined titles (and indeed there's a whole forum style channel approach that is literally thread-first as Struct claims to be). I'd also argue that Slack threads are focused around one initial message which gives a fair amount of context to it, they aren't on their own. Similarly you define: > Isolation: Enable clear separation of concurrent conversations to maintain focus and avoid confusion. Giving both products a 0 again: > Isolation | 0 | Bad. Channel level isolation is too broad. Even though both products have threads (not just channels) which are heavily used, and as mentioned Discord has given an entirely new channel type "Forum Channels" Now, I know you come back to some of those points later on in the post (after giving a score that, in my opinion, is very misleading). > Lately, Slack and Discord, have both added threads to allow some level of isolation. But, to achieve that, they had to break away from what made them special -- the liveness of conversations. I mean, Slack has had threads for years and years, and Discord's aren't that new either. You then say that these break away from liveness of conversations and reduces them to numbers, and yet that seems to be what Struct does for every single conversation? I appreciate this framework is very loose and you're trying to make a point to sell your product and way of thinking, but I find it difficult to trust you when you pose analyses such as these. --------- However, despite all of the above, the thing I am most concerned about is your pricing. You're trying to sell it as "innovative" when you are literally charging $0.13 per thread, per month. The entire point of realtime chat-based applications like Slack and Discord is to facilitate fast moving, frequent conversation, rather than the slow responses of forums and emails. If Slack was constrained to being thread-first, you'd likely see tens to hundreds of threads a day for a tiny company, let alone a giant one. I'd love to see if you're willing to post some estimates as to how much you expect your early customers' monthly bills to end up as. This feels extortionately expensive. (And just in case you think I missed it, I did read about "intelligently" forgetting threads but that feels so hand-wavy I don't even know how to address it, and part of having the history of something like Slack is that you can realise later on that you need information you previously said, even if you didn't think it important at the time).

audessuscest 3y ago

you can't add private channels so I can't really test it

mrjn 3y ago
That’s the next thing we are working on. Support for private channels.

ricklamers 3y ago

The unlock opportunity here is likely being underestimated. I heard once "you can be ahead of so many curves by being on Twitter", now add Discord and Slack. Also, you can remove the tediousness of Twitter feed scrolling because AI will make it easy to just ask for specific knowledge (if you know what you're looking for) or perform discovery based searching (what are some of the interesting ways in which people are using LangChain in this community). This is wild!

maxwell201922 3y ago

This looks like an exciting launch. We see so many pain points with Slack internally at Nutanix. We will signup for this. Excited to test the features!

pranay01 3y ago

We've been using Struct for SigNoz slack community. Here's how it looks https://knowledgebase.signoz.io/kb https://knowledgebase.signoz.io/kb Since, our community is so active, it helps a lot to have a tool like Struct to summarise discussions and have it for future reference.

anish_m 3y ago

Love the idea, and looking forward to using it. The unfortunate thing with slack and discord is that most of them are behind public search, and there is so much of lost wisdom for communities.

advaitruia 3y ago

Happy user here of the newly launched Discord integration :)

fidla 3y ago

$37 a month

ZeroCool2u 3y ago

This is a really cool idea and something I'd love to use, especially on large discord servers. Something that happened to me just yesterday was a friend of mine and I were trying to play a newly released game together and he was having a difficult to debug issue. The game is extremely popular and the dev team is literally 3 or 4 people. The main support channel is just a discord server, but that's incredibly hard to search for information about bugs and how people fix them. This is exactly the kind of thing I'd love to see added to the server, so that finding the information in the massive chat channels I needed was easier and could be distributed to others. If any Struct folks are around, the game is called BattleBit. The devs might be happy to hear from you!

mrjn 3y ago
Perhaps you could ask the devs nicely to install Struct Bot in their Discord server. I'm sure it would help the entire community to have a knowledge base.
- ZeroCool2u 3y ago
  I have already, but my broader point was that this seems like a really common use case that could help with adoption and growth.
  - mrjn 3y ago
    Strong Agree!