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Comment by Mivik | Hacker News Reader

Calculating with natural language may seem promising, but is not as productive as traditional calculators, especially when the "natural language" is actually a fixed grammar resembling natural language instead of employing fully extensible natural language (with AI, for example).

According to its documentation, this calculator has really limited capabilities. and it even charges for functions like calculating averages and converting currency.

I suspect that the audience for this type of software is quite limited, primarily inexperienced users. Users seeking higher productivity may either consider advanced software like Mathematica, or ChatGPT/WolframAlpha for general natural language questions.

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There is, for sure, a small learning curve, but for professionals that do lots of calculations day to day, it can save time for them, specially with variables and reusing a previous result. This can then act like a simple spreadsheet, where you can play with numbers and see the results updating on the entire page. Another advantage of Hissab over traditional calculators or even google search is the ability to see all your expressions at the same time as compared to alternatives where you can only do one line of calculations at a time and results disappear when performing another calculations.

Hissab is launched recently. Soon, I will be introducing the ability to calculate complex number, solve equations, calculus, probabilities, compound units etc on the Math side. also lot more calculations for computer science like IP address calculations, various hash algorithms calculators and many other features.

This will eventually become the all in one calculator to calculate anything. Again, small learning curve, but beyond that it can save a lot of time for professionals and students.

Generative AI is quite bad a doing math and I would not believe the results it "guesses".

Mathematica and wolfram are in a different pricing tier, so hissab is like a poor man's mathematica.

> Generative AI is quite bad a doing math and I would not believe the results it "guesses".

Generally speaking, it's true. AI is quite bad at arithmetic. But as AI started learning to use tools things can be different. Haven't really looked into this but I think ChatGPT with WolframAlpha plugin (https://www.wolfram.com/wolfram-plugin-chatgpt/) can be helpful.

People won't use generative models when they already have a clear plan about what they're about to calculate - they'll use a calculator. When employing generative models, we're more like asking the AI for some insights on "how to compute" or "what to compute". Automatically performing these calculations and obtaining the result is more like a bonus.

> Mathematica and wolfram are in a different pricing tier, so hissab is like a poor man's mathematica.

Agreed. Looking forward to exciting features!

I do believe the next stage of evolution for Hissab would be to integrate fully natural language via some form of AI, provided it gives accurate results. I have known about ChatGPT plugins and wolfram's integration. In fact they provide APIs that I can integrate in hissab. But I need to do the cost analysis for that.

Thanks for checking Hissab and your feedback!

Sometimes you don’t want to solve problems in the abstract, you just want to know what a ten year million dollar loan is worth at eight percent interest or something natural language like that. I type it into Google and it usually unrolls it and calculates it pretty well or finds a site for the problem. I hope this calculator has a good natural language vocabulary.

ya google is great with understanding natural language and providing either direct result or pointing to appropriate website. My goal is to improve Hissab's natural language capabilities as much as I can. Also, regarding the example you mentioned about calculating interest, I will be adding those features in the form of a function like simple interest(principle=1M, rate=8%, duration=10 years) etc. Its not natural language, but once you learn, and you do this a lot, hissab will come handy.

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