Review my startup: An artificial intuition based Q/A engine. | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup: An artificial intuition based Q/A engine.

8 pointsarihant9 comments

Link: www.snolr.com

Snolr works best currently finding short facts which you might need on the go. It's an early release and I need to iron down many things, but some feedback would be great.

Although we were doing private beta, it made sense to release and get some real feedback, hence a highly controlled initial version of the system.

Here is a list of sample questions - Where was obama born? What is the real name of lady gaga? Where is Bolivia? What country is Manila in? What is the largest city in Southeast asia? What is the capital city of India? Who founded carnegie mellon? What is the world's longest railroad? What is the fourth largest city in france? When was bill gates born? Who founded the facebook? When did martin luther king junior die?

PS: I submitted this before, but maybe at the wrong time as I am in a different timezone. I am not sure if I am breaking a guideline, but it seemed important as for a single founder, I can really use some feedback.

Interesting idea.

The slideshow on the front page changes too quickly once you get to the results pages. It is hard to see what is returned since it is only up there a few seconds.

How about providing a text box to allow the engine to be tested from the web. I know it is a mobile app, but before installing it I'd like to see if it produces useful results to something I might ask.

Thanks for pointing that out. A more interactive demo would certainly help. Also, the current webpage misses out the text-to-speech feature. I might work on that.

Thanks again! :)

Interesting. Your goals are similar to ours and your choice of name for the technology is also (too) similar. Are you using any of the concepts and ideas discussed at http://artificial-intuition.com and/or http://videos.syntience.com ?

Syntience Inc. is so far concentrating on understanding (written) text in any language but speech recognition is an obvious extension to any competent language understanding technology.

Clickable link: http://www.snolr.com

How does this compare to other question answering systems?

It's far more scalable in terms of technology. It uses intuition techniques and minimal NLP. So we can scale it to almost any language. Moreover, the system is not only limited to answer questions.

Also, it requires much less data. Usually Q/A systems have this thing called the query planner. We don't. It takes a single run through normal search results to get the answer. The speed to get, process and return answers is less than 500ms when the index is not hosted locally, so that includes the fetching lag.

The algo is completely online. No corpus, whatsoever.

These are just some examples of the fact that under the hood, it's completely different from the usual Q/A system.

Using on my iPhone and couldn't figure it out how it works.. Is something we need to download?

How do you pronounce it?

snaw-ler.

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