Thought I'd share what I've been working on for some time. Would love feedback!

It uses Deep learning models for natural language. Happy to answer tech related questions here.

Just a note: It's limited to San Francisco only for now - and it's still in Alpha - there will be kinks!

Really cool work - nice going! Great application of Deep Leaning.

I'm really curious about the Whatsapp and Facebook messenger integration, given that they don't seem to have published APIs. How did you do it?

From what I understand, it's not that they are integrated. Those apps allow to send and receive SMS. In doing so, they can simply send the queries via SMS on those apps, allowing to receive the result there.

Edit: I was wrong!

To clarify - the system is in fact natively integrated across the SMS, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger protocols. :) It's not using SMS as a way to talk to them.

If you use those, you'll see that the responses are almost instantaneous, compared to the lag which SMS inherently has. There is a general purpose API that can be used via any platform - Slack, Telegram, Gtalk, or email. Anything that supports text.

Thanks for clarification. I have used Whatsapp and it worked great until 08:30 PT when it suddenly stopped working.

When you say "natively integrated" what do you mean? As far as I can tell there are no APIs for either Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger.

For NLP, what API/lib are you guys using?

The language and entity recognition are using custom stuff that isn't part of any standard libs. For instance, in a query like "whats a good happy hour place in the mission?" - nothing is capitalized and all of the standard libs out there can't deal with it.

For building blocks - it's a combination - mixture of word2vec for feature vectors, and some parts of spaCy (though still experimental).

I'm unsure of what you mean by stating that none of the standard libs include what you need. Could you expand on this point?

Using your example, why couldn't you use a standard parts of speech tagger, even on a poorly-punctuated sentence?

Also could you expand on the NLP techniques you are actually using? How are you embedding the words/phrases/sentences into the vector space? Are you doing compositional embedding (unsure of the proper phrasing) where you embed a word, the phrase the word is in, the sentence the word is, etc all in the same vector space?

Very cool! I've been wondering why more messaging based assistants based in AI aren't emerging versus human-aided (Magic, Operator, etc.). (I was excited about carla.io but disappointingly it never really worked very well.)

This one is fast but still very natural. The suggested query in the onboarding flow obviously works very well, but I tried to throw it for a loop by asking where I can take a party of 20 for dinner in SF tonight (real problem so if anyone has suggestions would love to hear them!).

The response wasn't tremendously useful, but it was still an intelligible and coherent response (recommended 20 Spot--kind of a smart response actually!).

Asking friends, they've suggested Amici's or Buca Di Beppo so I can imagine the algorithm learning or being taught over time to incorporate characteristics like that (large groups). I like that it's a narrow use case to start--focus on that and build from there. Much more optimistic than the wide and shallow approach of Magic and Operator.

Why is it limited to San Fran right now?

@dumbfounder - it crawls data for its recommendations. In order to maintain quality and make sure it's useful, I've limited its scope for the time being. More locations are coming soon!

FYI, you can use Factual.com to get location data for all kinds of businesses. You'll still need to source reviews from somewhere else, but this might be a useful way of ensuring you have good coverage.

(disclaimer: I work at Factual, but a) I'm commenting as an individual, not representing the company; b) I genuinely think this is a good choice for you; c) for a small app like this, the data will likely be free, so I have no financial motivation!)

That's a great suggestion @donall. I'm already crawling the web for information and not just reviews, but the location database would be awesome. Is there a specific class of program you guys have for free data?

You can get free access to the API, capped at 10K requests per day. Hopefully that is enough to be useful at this initial stage!

After that, I think pricing depends on your app. I think it is extremely favourable to small/new startups, but I am am engineer and not a sales guy, so I don't want to say anything that might be both specific and wrong... (I hope this isn't starting to sound like a bait and switch sales pitch; if you want to talk offline my gmail is donallmc).

[Edited to update email]

Would love to play with it in Toronto - hope it gets here soon!

@mluskind - Absolutely. Phasing out launch as you might imagine.

+1 you should start taking email sign-ups. Would be nice to get notified when it expands to this market.

The rise of SMS based apps is very real.

This one looks cool though. Would love to try it when/if it rolls out to Los Angeles.

is this the return of smarterchild?

Very cool. Would love to see Myra expand scope beyond restaurants and place.

I just asked Myra for a breakfast suggestion, and she told me to go to a laser hair removal specialist... don't think it's quite ready.

Just a small design note: the white on green is pretty hard to read. (Maybe it's just my monitor or I'm getting old.) I'm assuming that image goes a long way to explain how it works, so legibility is paramount.

I think the problem with text based apps are that they cannot access our location constantly and I as a user has to take an extra step to inform the AI about my location every-time I need something.. As Myra is only limited to San Francisco, it is suggesting only places in that city.. I do not whether its possible for the message recipient to access our location on facebook..To the Myra Developers, But there is a share location feature on Whatsapp and Facebook that you guys should utilize to access our current location to recommend more location based queries..

As this feature is in Beta, I do not expect it to be perfect - but they could really improve on NLP in the application and understand my queries better, as it goes off-course if two different queries with different words but same meaning are asked..It is amazing, how this system is implemented but, if anyone is trying to build similar product they should try SMSsync[1] by Ushahidi - its still sort of beta product but gets the job done for a feature similar to this..

[1] http://www.ushahidi.com/product/smssync/

EDIT: I was only talking about how to implement the gateway part of the application quickly and not the whole Myra product, apologies for the mistake..

@machbio - thank you for the feedback! Definitely, not only can you share locations in whatsapp/FB, you can also do so in text messages. We have plans to integrate that soon, especially as the system launches on more cities.

Regarding the natural language - yes, the language models are trained on a dataset that doesn't yet account for all possible ways of expressing intent. As more users such as you interact with the system, it will get better at handling them.

viksit, at sameroom.io we are building real-time messaging gateway system (currently adding FB, Telegram and Whatsapp).

Would you be interested in us opening a generic API to apps like yours so we handle all protocol differences?

The FCC has been cracking down on companies using long codes for SMS services because those long codes aren't required to follow the normal SMS rules concerning opting in, opting out, opt less keywords (help messages). For short codes the phone companies each test the short code to confirm it's following the rules.

Further, these long codes switch companies frequently as they get reused when they're no longer in use, and SMS user numbers have been spammed with sms messages as a result.

Makes sense. Notably, however, this is an alpha product, very much a way to see user engagement and figure out what works and what doesn't, and what people want it to do. Once those questions are clarified, all the rest of the infrastructure will definitely be built up adhering to established standards.

In that respect, it absolutely makes sense to use a shortcode where you can conform to regulations.

It's important to note though that Myra only responds when asked for information, and never without. So, it makes sure not to spam at all.

Nice app !! This looks promising as people were raising concerns how much the magics or operators of the world can scale relying on humans to answer your queries. I'm interested to know more about tech involved in building this. You said it uses Deep Learning for NLP, but can you elaborate as what type of neural networks you have used like Recursive or Recurrent Neural networks or any other open source technologies that you find useful. I also liked your approach of scaling gradually by restricting the scope of queries that myra can answer.

I can't for the life of me figure out how to text that number with FB Messenger... am I missing something?

PS, it's interesting that CS224d : Deep Learning for NLP is trending at the same time as Myra. A lot of stuff is common to both - for instance, the topic on Recurrent neural nets for word embedding.

There are a bunch of very nice NL related experiments I've tried that are waiting in ipython notebooks, that we would love to experiment with here in production. If anyone here is interested in working on problems that relate to NLP/Deep Learning, and doing so with millisecond response times, at scale - you know what to do :)

Have you seen luka.ai they have been doing it for quite a while. Doing something very similar.

Myra is great. I am trying to get the app on my iPad. We are at a much early stage right now. What we have is a context understanding system.

http://crrnt.is:8080/?q=god

This query should be able to summarize well. It will be great if we can collabrate on data sharing at some level.

Does anybody remember I Want Sandy? That was the first product of this type that really worked well for me.

Absolutely - I tried it! I think the ability to interact with a service in a manner reserved for other humans makes it a more intimate (and arguably natural) experience.

The main motivation behind Myra is that it maintains conversational context - so you can ask questions and follow up with it without leaving that context.

Eg: "Find me a restaurant" and "Show me what people say about it".

Just like you would when speaking to a person - and one of the things that most (all?) other AI assistants out there lack.

From the example, I have to wonder, how quickly does that go through tinyurl links?

Agreed - I haven't had time to build my own url shortener yet :) Hopefully not too quickly.

Are we heading in the direction of WeChat where we have a single app as a platform?[1][2][3][4]

[1] https://medium.com/@mg/there-s-a-chat-for-that-apple-s-bigge...

[2] http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/8/1/app-unbundling-s...

[3] http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/

[4] http://vurb.com

You mean like email? Email is still used for just about everything: "instant" messaging, to-do lists, appointments, letters, bills, etc.

SMS could do most of that as well, and if you add an "AI" messager it could be pretty powerful. That said, an "AI" email interface would be just as useful.

Looks like this has some bugs. It is trapped in a loop. It asks me for my email address. When I send it it asks me again: “Hello, myaddress@gmail.com. Almost done. Please enter your email address. You'll never get spam - this is to ensure I can create a profile for you.”

Alright so the first hiccup I rant into was when you sent me a postscript telling me that using WhatsApp or Facebook messenger is a better experience. Well, I wanted better so I started going down that path. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to do that. Naturally, I asked you.

http://cl.ly/image/3k2U1c0i372d

And that didn’t work. Then I tried clicking on Messenger link on your site.

http://cl.ly/image/0L1L1T3w0F1P

But none of those are links. And then I tried your FAQ.

http://www.getmyra.co/faq

And I didn’t really find it. Messaging ‘Help’ didn’t really help. The problem is probably generational and I’m just too old for that feature, but it might be nice to make it easier for old dummies like me. I did, however, finally figure it out. You go to people in the Messenger app and then you + someone, which prompts for a phone number.

http://cl.ly/image/3g0e2x3Y1z3W

This then sent me down the same signup flow and ultimately told me I can’t reuse the same email address.

http://cl.ly/image/3G0r1C2K2R36

Based on that message, I wasn’t sure whether I type in a new email address or type restart. I try the email first.

You then reintroduce yourself and ask for my first name again. I give it again. And then you ask me for my email again. And do that again. And then you say thanks for signing up and give me that postscript about using Facebook for a better experience.

Unfortunately, I stopped there and honestly, I would have stopped a lot sooner. Please note that you sent me down this route and in the end it didn’t feel like a better experience. In fact, based on what I saw, it doesn’t seem like you know whether I was on FB or not.

Basically, be really careful of your recommendations to users on your signup flow. If you present a fork, you should follow it yourself to see how that changes things. I’m going to come back and play with this some more after I get through some other Show HNs, because I love talking to bots! It looks like you have a lot of feedback already. If I have some more unique feedback, I’ll post it as a reply to here. Thanks!

@kevin - Thanks for the detailed feedback! Appreciate it.

The sign up flow messaging could definitely use more work and I'll be sure to incorporate your feedback into it. One fix would be to be to simply ask for the email again as opposed to restarting the whole flow.

I just debugged what happened with the double signup BTW. Basically, an issue with FB Messenger is that not everyone associates their phone number with FB. If thats the case, Myra gets your FB account ID and not your phone number when you sign up. And as a result - it can't figure out you're the same user. Need to figure out how to fix that. Suggestions welcome actually.

Mind if I ask how you go about the natural language processsing? Is it using something such as Wit.ai?

Of course. I thought about using wit.ai a few months ago, but I found a lot of issues in how they approach parsing and classification. Specifically, training it is a very manual process, and customization and tweaking is very hard.

I've built my own API which can do entity and language parsing. It relies on utilizing word embeddings (such as those described here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4546.pdf).

The first question I asked is current temperature, and it kept to feed me some show reservation schedule and yelp reviews.

This is a bit retarded.

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.

When will we see a gender neutral name for an assistant app?

my problem with this type of app is that all of these capabilities are already handled faster/easier by other native apps without having to type out a full sentence of what I want....ie Google now (esp with voice search), yelp, uber, 4sq etc etc

Question: it cost about $0.03 per SMS message, right? This seems like a large business overhead compared to web apps.

Are there less expensive ways to send 10s of thousands of SMS messages per month?

I think this is a very cool idea.

"THAT HELPS YOU FIND PLACES TO GO OUT TO"

Yeah... kindly make that visible UP TOP without having to visit the FAQ. A lot of us use personal assistants to do stuff that doesn't involve venues, dining, retail, or geolocation.