6 ms·

Wit.ai (YC W14) Is Joining Facebook

217 points by ar7hur 12y ago

dbish 12y ago
Always loved their interface. I'm interested to see if Facebook will make it easy for the tech to be shared with their Oculus developers as well to create VR agents or controls that are easy to interact with via voice.
pmalynin 12y ago
Our incredible journey.
- kenrikm 12y ago
  I can imagine that this is how it feels when you go from a few people in a apartment/basement/house to a company with an office and eventually acquisition. (I've only been through two of the three so far) Regardless of how cliche it might sound at this point it's understandable they always use the same term.
  - andreasklinger 12y ago
    I assume she/he refers to this: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- jewel 12y ago
  I don't think that's a fair label in this case since they are keeping the product. For context, the blog at http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com highlights the contradiction when an acquisition announcement is filled with flowery language about the adventure of building the product and other excitement while simultaneously shuttering the product. Obviously everyone has the right to shut down their products, but it'd be nice if they said "We are sorry that we are going to be unable to continue offering this service".
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    Just wait a few months
- pearjuice 12y ago
  It's well known that anyone a bit into SV and its surroundings is aware of this "meme" and founders are often placing bets whether they will include it in their acquisition-of-product-PR or not.
joeblau 12y ago
Congrats to the team. I had high hopes that this would become a self sustaining product. Hopefully you guys get to continue this work at Facebook.
jayp 12y ago
Congratulations to the Wit.ai team. I was never a user, but when I checked them out, did think their offering showed great promise. I suppose the offer from Facebook must've been too good to say no.
mtrimpe 12y ago
Congratulations on the acquisition! I'm assuming that puts an end to my dreams of Wit.ai supporting device-local voice recognition with context-limited vocabularies to drive user interfaces though...
- tim176 12y ago
  Check out mindmeld.com (built by Expect Labs). It is a platform for building voice-driven interfaces with context-limited vocabularies.
- pavlov 12y ago
  ... device-local voice recognition with context-limited vocabularies to drive user interfaces That would be really interesting to me as well. Do you know of any other project or startup working on that? Similar to the OpenCV library for computer vision, I wish there were an "OpenVC" for voice control.
  - jeremyflores 12y ago
    There's OpenEars, which is free: http://www.politepix.com/openears/ http://www.politepix.com/openears/. Basically, you can define vocabulary sets to check against, and you provide a callback to know when a word has been detected. Depending on the complexity of the vocabularies, you might need to spring for the Rejecto plugin to improve the results.
  - dnr 12y ago
    I found pocketsphinx pretty easy to work with. I use it for command voice recognition for home automation stuff. It's even pretty accurate when using limited vocabulary models, after some tweaking. There are python bindings, though they lag behind the C api slightly, and even the C api is well-commented and the code is clean.
    - frik 12y ago
      Do you have a write-up/blog post or article about pocketsphinx? How do you create/train the vocabulary models? If you use Text-to-speech too (CMU Flite, eSpeak), maybe you know some good resources there as well?
securingsincity 12y ago
Wit.ai is a great service and it is great news Facebook will be keeping them open. Would be a great fit for some of their other dev services like Parse. I built an app that took some users voice commands and pokes fun at the users crudely and it took so little time to build because of Wit.ai.
Karunamon 12y ago
The platform will remain open and become entirely free for everyone. A nice model, this. Facebook gets a huge corpus of semantic data from the users of the app, and everyone else gets an ever-more-sophisticated classifier for their commands. That's a win/win for everyone. Well done and congrats!
- objclxt 12y ago
  Maybe I'm cynical, but talk is cheap. I remember when Facebook bought face.com. From the face.com blogpost announcing it: > "we love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer community.” ...the API was shut down some time later. I would dispute the claim the developer community was supported as a result of that deal. A blog post saying the platform will remain open isn't a commitment, it's a vague, hand wavy promise.
  - jackpirate 12y ago
    You may not trust the statement, but "open and entirely free for everyone" is neither vague nor hand wavy.
    - richardwhiuk 12y ago
      For how long? What do you mean by open? What do you mean by entirely free - do you mean there will never be usage limits?
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    The reason I don't think that will happen here is Wit's pricing model - it's completely gratis to use, with the proviso that your commands and associations are public. You cough up cash if want that to remain private. As long as new users are using Wit, Facebook continues to get value from the product. Closing it down wouldn't gain them much.
    - deet 12y ago
      Wit sent this email to customers today: - If you have a paying subscription, you won’t be charged again and your instance(s) will remain private. - Your open instance(s) will remain open - If you have open instance(s) that you want to make private (for free), please wait for a few days until we roll out this feature. I'm a paying customer and had plans to pay them significantly more (I am building an app that will be released in a few months that will heavily rely on it). Personally I'd rather see it stay a paid service since I want an SLA and support. That said, Wit.ai is a great service, the team is friendly and responsive, and I congratulate them.
ilyaeck 12y ago
Congrats Alex and team!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
lowglow 12y ago
These Wi.AI t-shirts I have are now a collector's item!
- francis88 12y ago
  haha
- dnautics 12y ago
  Startup tee shirts as a "poor man's equity scheme".
  - bduerst 12y ago
    And here I thought they were a currency.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ma2xd 12y ago
rip
devniel 12y ago
congrats
Breefield 12y ago
Was just telling a non-tech friend about Wit. Try, explaining NLP and classifiers to someone who isn't quite sure what dictation is, made for a quick ride up the chair lift at Kirkwood.
yoda_sl 12y ago
I wasn't aware of Wit.ai until today's news... but now after checking out their web site and API, it will be probably a great addition of their API to Parse.com! Potentially some killer features can come up by combining both systems... Siri on steroid with cross platform solution! ouch!
jathu 12y ago
Congrats to the Wit.ai team! For once I'm glad it was facebook who acquired them. I've been truly happy with Parse and can only begin to wonder how facebook will integrate all the developer tools they are acquiring.
puredanger 12y ago
Nice to see another Clojure company succeeding!
lars_francke 12y ago
Hadn't heard of wit.ai before. Seems very nice. One huge thing missing from the site is any information about supported languages. Still don't know....
- canadev 12y ago
  Agreed with the first part. Never heard of it, looks cool. As for the second, I disagree: https://wit.ai/docs https://wit.ai/docs
  - lars_francke 12y ago
    I don't mean programming language but things like English, German, Mandarin etc.
    - canadev 12y ago
      Ah. I totally missed that.
steveklabnik 12y ago
This may be the first company that's had Rust code in production get aquired: https://wit.ai/docs/rust/1.0.0/quickstart https://wit.ai/docs/rust/1.0.0/quickstart I mean, it's obviously a small part, there's absolutely no way I'd suggest Rust was a part of that, just a minor point of trivia. :)
michaelbuckbee 12y ago
Pure speculation here, but it doesn't seem crazy to think that this is in part for use by the Oculus team. While voice commands are a nice to have on current mobile phones - they are likely to be a much bigger deal for head mounted displays.
- blazespin 12y ago
  Unlike vomit inducing 'VR' (I own both dev kits) and over broad ideas of 'IoT' - speech and intelligent assistants (ie, siri/cortana/ok google, alexa, jibo, etc) is the future of computing.
- dshankar 12y ago
  If the Oculus team wanted to acquire Wit.ai, they could've acquired Wit themselves (as they recently did with Nimble). Keep in mind Oculus is an independently operating subsidiary within Facebook.
- dysfunction 12y ago
  This acquisition actually makes a lot more sense to me than Facebook buying Oculus. Oculus' ostensible business model was selling hardware to users, which is totally orthogonal to Facebook's business model of selling users to advertisers. IMO there's absolutely no way Facebook bought Oculus just to get the revenue from selling Oculus hardware, but I still don't see what their plan would be for integrating that hardware into their existing business model. I can definitely see how a natural-language API would fit in.
p4bl0 12y ago
A friend of mine's reaction, quoting bits of the linked post: <Mc> 18 months ago, we started Wit.ai with the vision that no solution is to be found in a closed, centralized, managed approach. <Mc> That is where today’s big news comes in: Wit.ai is joining Facebook!
jscheel 12y ago
I love wit.ai. Really hope Facebook isn't just blowing smoke about keeping them open.
perrylaj 12y ago
Congrats to Wit, though I can't help but be a little saddened that the self-hosted/embedded licensing may be less likely to roll out as a result. I've been playing with the platform and could definitely find some use, but most of our target market is unlikely to accept cloud based services, especially those associated with data-mining organizations. Fingers crossed that such licenses/installations are still on the roadmap.

217 points by ar7hur 12y ago

dbish 12y ago

Always loved their interface. I'm interested to see if Facebook will make it easy for the tech to be shared with their Oculus developers as well to create VR agents or controls that are easy to interact with via voice.

pmalynin 12y ago

Our incredible journey.

kenrikm 12y ago
I can imagine that this is how it feels when you go from a few people in a apartment/basement/house to a company with an office and eventually acquisition. (I've only been through two of the three so far) Regardless of how cliche it might sound at this point it's understandable they always use the same term.
- andreasklinger 12y ago
  I assume she/he refers to this: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
jewel 12y ago
I don't think that's a fair label in this case since they are keeping the product. For context, the blog at http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com highlights the contradiction when an acquisition announcement is filled with flowery language about the adventure of building the product and other excitement while simultaneously shuttering the product. Obviously everyone has the right to shut down their products, but it'd be nice if they said "We are sorry that we are going to be unable to continue offering this service".
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  Just wait a few months
pearjuice 12y ago
It's well known that anyone a bit into SV and its surroundings is aware of this "meme" and founders are often placing bets whether they will include it in their acquisition-of-product-PR or not.

joeblau 12y ago

Congrats to the team. I had high hopes that this would become a self sustaining product. Hopefully you guys get to continue this work at Facebook.

jayp 12y ago

Congratulations to the Wit.ai team. I was never a user, but when I checked them out, did think their offering showed great promise. I suppose the offer from Facebook must've been too good to say no.

mtrimpe 12y ago

Congratulations on the acquisition! I'm assuming that puts an end to my dreams of Wit.ai supporting device-local voice recognition with context-limited vocabularies to drive user interfaces though...

tim176 12y ago
Check out mindmeld.com (built by Expect Labs). It is a platform for building voice-driven interfaces with context-limited vocabularies.
pavlov 12y ago
... device-local voice recognition with context-limited vocabularies to drive user interfaces That would be really interesting to me as well. Do you know of any other project or startup working on that? Similar to the OpenCV library for computer vision, I wish there were an "OpenVC" for voice control.
- jeremyflores 12y ago
  There's OpenEars, which is free: http://www.politepix.com/openears/ http://www.politepix.com/openears/. Basically, you can define vocabulary sets to check against, and you provide a callback to know when a word has been detected. Depending on the complexity of the vocabularies, you might need to spring for the Rejecto plugin to improve the results.
- dnr 12y ago
  I found pocketsphinx pretty easy to work with. I use it for command voice recognition for home automation stuff. It's even pretty accurate when using limited vocabulary models, after some tweaking. There are python bindings, though they lag behind the C api slightly, and even the C api is well-commented and the code is clean.
  - frik 12y ago
    Do you have a write-up/blog post or article about pocketsphinx? How do you create/train the vocabulary models? If you use Text-to-speech too (CMU Flite, eSpeak), maybe you know some good resources there as well?

securingsincity 12y ago

Wit.ai is a great service and it is great news Facebook will be keeping them open. Would be a great fit for some of their other dev services like Parse. I built an app that took some users voice commands and pokes fun at the users crudely and it took so little time to build because of Wit.ai.

Karunamon 12y ago

The platform will remain open and become entirely free for everyone. A nice model, this. Facebook gets a huge corpus of semantic data from the users of the app, and everyone else gets an ever-more-sophisticated classifier for their commands. That's a win/win for everyone. Well done and congrats!

objclxt 12y ago
Maybe I'm cynical, but talk is cheap. I remember when Facebook bought face.com. From the face.com blogpost announcing it: > "we love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer community.” ...the API was shut down some time later. I would dispute the claim the developer community was supported as a result of that deal. A blog post saying the platform will remain open isn't a commitment, it's a vague, hand wavy promise.
- jackpirate 12y ago
  You may not trust the statement, but "open and entirely free for everyone" is neither vague nor hand wavy.
  - richardwhiuk 12y ago
    For how long? What do you mean by open? What do you mean by entirely free - do you mean there will never be usage limits?
- Karunamon 12y ago
  The reason I don't think that will happen here is Wit's pricing model - it's completely gratis to use, with the proviso that your commands and associations are public. You cough up cash if want that to remain private. As long as new users are using Wit, Facebook continues to get value from the product. Closing it down wouldn't gain them much.
  - deet 12y ago
    Wit sent this email to customers today: - If you have a paying subscription, you won’t be charged again and your instance(s) will remain private. - Your open instance(s) will remain open - If you have open instance(s) that you want to make private (for free), please wait for a few days until we roll out this feature. I'm a paying customer and had plans to pay them significantly more (I am building an app that will be released in a few months that will heavily rely on it). Personally I'd rather see it stay a paid service since I want an SLA and support. That said, Wit.ai is a great service, the team is friendly and responsive, and I congratulate them.

ilyaeck 12y ago

Congrats Alex and team!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

lowglow 12y ago

These Wi.AI t-shirts I have are now a collector's item!

francis88 12y ago
haha
dnautics 12y ago
Startup tee shirts as a "poor man's equity scheme".
- bduerst 12y ago
  And here I thought they were a currency.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ma2xd 12y ago

rip

devniel 12y ago

congrats

Breefield 12y ago

Was just telling a non-tech friend about Wit. Try, explaining NLP and classifiers to someone who isn't quite sure what dictation is, made for a quick ride up the chair lift at Kirkwood.

yoda_sl 12y ago

I wasn't aware of Wit.ai until today's news... but now after checking out their web site and API, it will be probably a great addition of their API to Parse.com! Potentially some killer features can come up by combining both systems... Siri on steroid with cross platform solution! ouch!

jathu 12y ago

Congrats to the Wit.ai team! For once I'm glad it was facebook who acquired them. I've been truly happy with Parse and can only begin to wonder how facebook will integrate all the developer tools they are acquiring.

puredanger 12y ago

Nice to see another Clojure company succeeding!

lars_francke 12y ago

Hadn't heard of wit.ai before. Seems very nice. One huge thing missing from the site is any information about supported languages. Still don't know....

canadev 12y ago
Agreed with the first part. Never heard of it, looks cool. As for the second, I disagree: https://wit.ai/docs https://wit.ai/docs
- lars_francke 12y ago
  I don't mean programming language but things like English, German, Mandarin etc.
  - canadev 12y ago
    Ah. I totally missed that.

steveklabnik 12y ago

This may be the first company that's had Rust code in production get aquired: https://wit.ai/docs/rust/1.0.0/quickstart https://wit.ai/docs/rust/1.0.0/quickstart I mean, it's obviously a small part, there's absolutely no way I'd suggest Rust was a part of that, just a minor point of trivia. :)

michaelbuckbee 12y ago

Pure speculation here, but it doesn't seem crazy to think that this is in part for use by the Oculus team. While voice commands are a nice to have on current mobile phones - they are likely to be a much bigger deal for head mounted displays.

blazespin 12y ago
Unlike vomit inducing 'VR' (I own both dev kits) and over broad ideas of 'IoT' - speech and intelligent assistants (ie, siri/cortana/ok google, alexa, jibo, etc) is the future of computing.
dshankar 12y ago
If the Oculus team wanted to acquire Wit.ai, they could've acquired Wit themselves (as they recently did with Nimble). Keep in mind Oculus is an independently operating subsidiary within Facebook.
dysfunction 12y ago
This acquisition actually makes a lot more sense to me than Facebook buying Oculus. Oculus' ostensible business model was selling hardware to users, which is totally orthogonal to Facebook's business model of selling users to advertisers. IMO there's absolutely no way Facebook bought Oculus just to get the revenue from selling Oculus hardware, but I still don't see what their plan would be for integrating that hardware into their existing business model. I can definitely see how a natural-language API would fit in.

p4bl0 12y ago

A friend of mine's reaction, quoting bits of the linked post: <Mc> 18 months ago, we started Wit.ai with the vision that no solution is to be found in a closed, centralized, managed approach. <Mc> That is where today’s big news comes in: Wit.ai is joining Facebook!

jscheel 12y ago

I love wit.ai. Really hope Facebook isn't just blowing smoke about keeping them open.

perrylaj 12y ago

Congrats to Wit, though I can't help but be a little saddened that the self-hosted/embedded licensing may be less likely to roll out as a result. I've been playing with the platform and could definitely find some use, but most of our target market is unlikely to accept cloud based services, especially those associated with data-mining organizations. Fingers crossed that such licenses/installations are still on the roadmap.