Introducing Ixoth, Siri's little helper. Webhooks for Siri | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Ixoth, Siri's little helper. Webhooks for Siri

ixoth.com

53 pointsqrush9 comments

Good idea. Though I don't have Siri so I have no use for it at the time…

It feels that it should work like http://ifttt.com with recipes and pre-defined actions rather than having to code and host each webhook manually.

The difficult thing is that you don't get to benefit from Siri's ability to understand the meaning rather than the specific phrase said. Which means you either have to have your own engine or have a fairly specific list of commands for each webhook.

edit: (granted I understand this is a very early version) the thing with having to write your own code is that right now you're just removing one step from me doing it myself. I could get my own Twilio number, and do the sorting by keyword myself before running the different scripts.

edit: also, see http://tyranotext.com/

This uses SMS right? Isn't that a bit costly?

Could you do that same with email for instance?

It's a great idea all in all. Lot's of companies will be looking for a way to integrate with Siri, and this approach seems quite fair.

I see possible uses:

Messaging with your dry cleaner. "Siri, ask My Dry Cleaner when my dry cleaning will be done" Send email/sms to contact with name "My Dry Cleaner" with text "when will my dry cleaning be done". Get email/sms back with date and time

Messaging with your TV [schedule]. "Siri, ask My TV if [enter name of show] is running tonight" Get sms/email back from your TV :)

This will all need natural language parsing on the backend though.

Yep, it's using SMS. This will be a paid service.

I am really excited to see the use cases here, and to become a "platform" of sorts to build on top of.

Just curious, what sort of SMS backend/API are you using to accept and deliver messages?

Curses. Had this same idea the day Siri came out but no time to execute. Good job! Interested to see how people put this to use.

Thanks Jeremy! If you have ideas related to it I'd love to see how I can help.

I'm surprised you named a product designed to be spoken by name something so unpronounceable.

I agree that the name is not easy but the good news is that you can call it whatever you want since Siri just sends a text to the contact you're telling it to, and you can call the Ixoth contact something easier to pronounce.

I'm not sure why this is Siri specific. I can send text messages using my voice with Android as well. Maybe I'm missing something, but this looks like a service that interacts via SMS instead of anything specific to Siri. I do like the concept of this service and I can think of many uses for it.

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