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Comment by natch | Hacker News Reader

Nice synthesis of a lot of sources! Pretty cool.

The text on the landing page "to help you create brilliant…" is being stomped over by the scrolling element that shows words CEOs, leaders, innovators, people, etc.

"Insanely powerful" in the headline here seems a bit much. We did a lot of this in the 1990's [— edit: no, scratch that, 2000's —] with scripts that pasted together results from a few scrape calls. We also had keyword extraction, quote highlighting, and sentiment analysis then, but not integrated into our prototype, just in independent small projects. Nice to see that stuff and other sprinklings of ML stuff integrated here.

The site is a little over-designed for my taste (bubbly fonts, etc.) but maybe you like it, that's fine.

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A little marketing never hurt anyone;)

But jokes aside, there actually is an insane amount of technology that we built to make this possible. Thankfully we are standing on the shoulders of giants and NLP has developed a lot of the past few years.

For starters, we have to find the right person and successfully differentiate them vs others with their name. Next we extract their quotes vs what others said about them (from text + videos). We also built AI models to tag and organize the person’s Ideas by emotions and other helpful insights. Essentially it’s a knowledge graph that’s dynamically built mapping a person’s opinions and worldview.

It’s still early, but we are getting closer to a search experience that does the research for you. What’s a killer search feature you always wanted?

I think what you have is an impressive technology demo but as far as a search feature, not answering your question here, but addressing something else:

People search is not something I've ever pursued or imagined being super interested in. It just feels a little stalky. I guess there are innocent uses too though as your site lays out. You could also look into ways the technology could be used or recontextualized to be less stalky-adjacent.

For example, you could focus more strictly on just public figures. Or do movie stars with their best quotes on and off screen.

Or, maybe you feel that you have ways to address what I'm saying, or that your current path is fine. Or you embrace its stalky nature and want to take that even further. Whatever way, it's up to you; I'm just one internet voice.

Good luck!

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