Wit.ai (YC W14) Is Joining Facebook

[Karunamon]

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]

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.

[p4bl0]

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!

[yoda_sl]

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!

[michaelbuckbee]

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.

[dysfunction]

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.

[blazespin]

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]

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.

[securingsincity]

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.

[jathu]

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.

[mtrimpe]

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...

[pavlov]

... 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.

[tim176]

Check out mindmeld.com (built by Expect Labs). It is a platform for building voice-driven interfaces with context-limited vocabularies.

[ilyaeck]

Check out Robin Labs

[jayp]

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.

[lars_francke]

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]

Agreed with the first part. Never heard of it, looks cool.

As for the second, I disagree: https://wit.ai/docs

[joeblau]

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.

[steveklabnik]

This may be the first company that's had Rust code in production get aquired: 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. :)

[puredanger]

Nice to see another Clojure company succeeding!

[dbish]

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.

[Breefield]

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.

[perrylaj]

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.

[jscheel]

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

[lowglow]

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

[dnautics]

Startup tee shirts as a "poor man's equity scheme".

[francis88]

haha

[ilyaeck]

Congrats Alex and team!

[devniel]

congrats