[stormy]

Hard to beat the on-boarding experience—just input your number and get going. I like the thought that went into making it as simple as possible.

The response times seem instantaneous, which given what's going on under the hood, probably wasn't the easiest to accomplish. The speed went a long way to keep me engaged and trying new queries. What tech stack does any given query hit and what pieces needed the most focus to keep request latency low?

My major question is, when would I use this over Siri?

Siri is usually good enough for the same types of queries I tried. Good enough and faster access to Siri will probably make my use of something like Myra limited in current form.

For a more concrete example, if I am in the Mission and I don't know what's good to eat, I'll hold down my home button on the iPhone and ask siri: "restaurants in the mission". From there it's easy to get into Yelp and then do all my further refinements and actions without needing to text or form any more natural language queries.

Now, if future functionality is in place that gets over that 'good enough' barrier, I think this is on to something.

Kudos.

[viksit]

Thank you for trying it out! Let me try to answer your queries. No pun intended of course.

- Siri doesn't maintain conversational context. If you wanted to find a sushi place in SOMA, and the recommendation was too expensive, you could just say "show me something cheaper" to Myra. For Siri, you'd have to repeat saying "cheap sushi places in the mission" which (doesnt work today and) would show you a whole different set of results. You can also never ask Siri things like "Show me reviews for Foreign Cinema" and "get me a reservation there".

- Siri's not good at answering questions. If you ask it for happy hour places in the mission for instance, or the best outdoor date spot in SF - the results are simply not useful. Myra will not only recommend a place, but also things like when the happy hour time is, and why the japanese gardens in Golden Gate Park are a good outdoor date spot. More importantly, it will factor in things like open times and available reservations when showing you this data.

- Also, when you're having a group conversation with other people, when it's too noisy around you, or you have something private to say - text is always better.

Re: Tech stack - for every query, you are actually seeing live results (for instance, reservation data can't be cached). Doing the NL parts quickly was the most challenging piece so far. It's written in Python.

Hope this helps.