Mike Fine (Comcast):
“I recently used Speaktoit’s natural language processing API (www.api.ai) to build a voice- and text-chat web app that “knows about” television shows and television actors. The project was part of a Hack Week at Comcast’s Silion Valley Innovation Center.
In just over two days, I went from having never heard of Speaktoit or api.ai to a fully functional application that had an impressive set of features. Their website made it easy to sign up, discover my API keys, learn the key concepts of the system, and set up the “entities” (enumerated objects) and “intents” (commands) that form the core of my api.ai application. I was particularly impressed with how easy it was to manually test my entity and intent set up right from within their web application, without having to write any code. Once I got the core functionality of my app running, I used their REST API to programmatically create a thousand entities. Overall, their system was easy to learn, easy to use, and just plain worked.
If you’re thinking about building an application that involves natural language processing (voice- or text-based), check out Speaktoit’s API.AI. You’ll have something impressive up and running in no time.”
During the hackathon, Mike created an application that “knows about movies”. Here is an example of how a user could interact with it:
User: Show me movies with Brad Pitt
App: Displays list of movies with Brad Pitt
User: How about ones that also have Angelina Jolie?
App: Brings up movies with both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
User: Nevermind. Show me comedies from 2002 to 2010.
App: Displays list
User: Ones with Louis CK
App: Provides a list of comedies with Louis CK from 2002-2010
