Comment by Menlo_Park | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Menlo_Park | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys,

Leo from ChatGrape here. We're focusing on two areas of innovation, to add a certain level of intelligence to chat based team communication:

1. Deep Service Integrations: Our integrations of tools and services like Gmail, GitHub etc function on a much more integrated level than what has previously been achieved. For instance, on ChatGrape, all your issues (GitHub) and files (Google Drive / DropBox) are available within the chat, thanks to a smart auto complete that attaches or references all your documents - right as you type.

2. Speech Act Detection (Natural Language Processing): This is all about the triggering of workflows based on normal, "day to day" communications. For example, if I were to write, "Hey Tobi, let's meet up tomorrow at 2pm to discuss the front end issue!" three things will happen: First, you'll be notified, second a calendar event will be added to your Google Calendar and third, the topic or issue will be automatically referenced or attached.

Natural language processing within ChatGrape goes much further, anyhow, and is a topic where our engineering team has gained many years of experience with previous projects.

We're using to make communication simpler and more efficient, whilst not disrupting your normal flow of conversation. (Another example of this is to automatically detect and mark whether / or questions, and mark them as such.)

ChatGrape went live in an Early Access Phase (Pre-Beta) phase about six weeks ago and not nearly everything of what'll ultimately make ChatGrape the first smart communication solution for teams is fully operational or even deployed yet.

However, what I wrote above will give you guys a better idea of it is that sets ChatGrape apart from all existing solutions like Slack or Hipchat.

I'm looking forward to your feedback and questions and I'm always available via lf@ubergrape.com! And we'd of course be happy about you guys joining our Early Access Phase to provide further feedback.

Seems like your strong selling point is the NLP stuff.

I think that the vast majority of your target market is already using Slack or Hipchat or something like that, and switching chat systems is a big deal. It's a pain in the ass and not something you want to do.

So, is the NLP feature good enough to make people switch? I would argue that it's not. But, if your NLP actually does add a lot of value, then it's probably good enough that it could be an addon feature to Slack or any of the other chat services.

So, here's my idea: make a hosted NLP bot that integrates into whatever chat system you're using (super easy with Hubot). Then, I can continue to use Slack/IRC/Jabber/HipChat, but I could also buy your chat bot to augment with NLP stuff.

It opens up your market by not requiring people to switch chat apps, and lets you focus on what it seems like you want to focus on the most anyways- NLP.

JIRA integration seems like a no-brainer since that's such a common tool in startups and other development shops. Why isn't it mentioned on the signup page where you list several tools? All you're doing there is asking which tools the users use, so it seems there would be no harm in letting people give you the input that they're using it, even if you don't integrate with it yet.

Hi natch, thanks for pointing this out! We set out initially with compiling a small survey of the tools that are most widely used among startups, since we figured they're the ones who're most likely to become Early Adopters. Doing this, we saw that most (some 90 something per cent) where using GitHub, DropBox and Google Drive, so we set out to add these first. However, we're of course always trying to figure out what our potential users might be most interested in so we're asking everyone what their favorite integrations would be - hence the feedback box during the sign up process. We've already identified a dozen tools and services we need to integrate with (Trello, for instance, will go live early next week) and we're working full time on adding as many as possibly as soon as possible. If you'd like to, I'd be happy to personally notify you once JIRA is live?

Mmh. The auto completion can be a nice feature, but how do populate the dictionary for auto complete of jira/github issues ?

Stop selling so hard. Use your regular voice.

Point taken! Guess I was a bit too exciting about being on the frontpage of HN, that's like a dream come true, hehe :-)

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