Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine beta

[fizzbatter]

Man, i really love wit.ai, one of the coolest projects i've worked with. Unfortunately, these days i'm becoming jaded to X as a Service. Things like hosting or databases as a service are quantifiable, i have an idea of how much effort it takes me to migrate away... but AI? Especially the cool AI flavored NLP that wit.ai offers - it's just too hard to migrate away from for me.

With that said, i understand how hard doing this in a home baked way could be. I think i just won't be happy until we have repositories of standardized ai training sets or baked results (forgive any pseudo terms). It just feels like these days, using awesome AI services means cementing yourself into the service, and making their service stronger as you increase their datasets and training.

As much as i really do love wit.ai, i just don't want to use these types of services unless my backs against a wall.

[blandinw]

(cofounder of Wit.ai here) Thanks for your kind words :) I understand your concerns, here is my take.

X as a service allows you to get X with a lot less efforts. It allows you to understand the problem and your needs by getting started quickly. Over time, if X as a service saved you enough time and you become successful, you can choose to develop an expertise in X and cut the dependency.

Wit is also about building a community of developers and advancing the state of the art of NLP in apps. Once the bot engine matures a bit, we'll be focusing again on the community aspect of Wit and hopefully advance the field enough so that efforts like the standardization you mentioned are started.

[Joeri]

Isn't microsoft's luis.ai providing a very similar kind of service?

[nl]

I really like the "deliberate overfitting of stories to make them behave like rules" approach. It's the kind of thing that sounds obvious as soon as you say it, but only comes from deep immersion in the problem space.

I'm thinking of lots of other places I can use it too now - is there a name for this approach yet?

[ar7hur]

Thanks Nick. No name yet, do you have a suggestion? Uberfitting? :)

[ar7hur]

Hi everyone! I'm one of the cofounders. This is an early beta of our Bot Engine. We would love to get the community's feedback. Thanks!

[petr_tik]

Hey Ar7hur, Awesome Bot Engine - thanks. 2 questions, if I can: 1. How much of an inspiration did the Telegram bot API make on your dev team? 2. What's the NLP back-end for it and what are your plans for duckling? I forked it a while ago and was going to add some languages I know - would that be useful?

Thanks for an awesome product!

[mintplant]

I'm interested in this, but is there any info about pricing available yet?

[devty]

hey ar7hur - excited about the release.

i've seen/heard that wit.ai likes to use clojure (lisp for AI programming? of course!). was clojure used to power Bot Engine? if so, how did your team like the experience?

[alainchabat]

Hi! that's awesome! I started to play with it .

I was wondering if there is any way to have predefined stories? I'm sure there is already a bunch of "weather" stories or "how are you" stories that must come over and over. I don't want to spend much time on it

[xumx]

So far my experience have been terrible. Worse experience than the previous version. It is difficult to understand how stories work. It doesn't fit well with the Facebook messenger platform.

Lacks documentation and examples. There is no support for story branching, conditional flows, or intents.

What is Merge supposed to do.. How is it possible for my server code to know what to merge the entity into context, without knowing the intent.

[alainchabat]

Hi, sorry to report a bug (or is it me missing anything?). I successfully created the first story. However, the second story (basic, just text) keeps failing. Wondering what I did wrong ? https://www.dropbox.com/s/32bly2hei8ehm1s/Screenshot%202016-...

[melvinmt]

How can I test my own bot without using the API?

Basically looking for something like this: https://wit.ai/Francis88/Internet%20of%20Things/eval?_t=856&...

[blandinw]

We're actually working on it :-) The F8 rush took us a bit by surprise... Shipping soon! http://imgur.com/hjswrHT

[brandnewlow]

Anyone want to build a bot with me? I'm playing around with this and it looks really fun.

[jeromekjerome]

Love to collaborate ...

[kenpeltzer]

With the Messenger platform being opened up today as well, are there currently plans to provide some kind of boilerplate integration between the Messenger api and the wit.ai HTTP api?

Been playing with the Bot Engine all day btw - great product so far :)

[patapizza]

(Wit.ai engineer here)

Thank you for the interest :-)

We haven't released any examples showing an integration with Messenger Platform API. In the meantime, please refer to the Messenger Platform docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/quic...

If you have any feedback, please shoot!

[nodesocket]

What would be a business use-case? For example, we heavily use Slack for ops notifications (PagerDuty, Datadog, Opbeat), is the hope that companies will adopt Facebook messenger like companies adopt Slack?

Thanks for the insight.

[ar7hur]

You can use Bot Engine to build a Slack bot too, it's not tied to Messenger in any way, there is a HTTPS API.

Use cases on Messenger will probably be more around customer care or entertainment, news, etc.

[mwcampbell]

How can users communicate with a Bot Engine bot? Since wit.ai is part of Facebook, I naturally wonder if these bots will be locked into the Facebook platform.

[blandinw]

Bot Engine is not tied to the Facebook platform. It exposes an HTTPS API that you can use from anywhere. Slack, the command-line, Messenger, a VR app, etc. We don't make assumptions on your platform.

https://wit.ai/docs/http/20160330#converse-link

[dharma1]

Does this work together with a speech recognition/TTS API from Wit? My use case is a Unity3D VR app