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Introducing Ozlo – Personal AI chatbot

medium.com

54 points by anant 10 years ago · 23 comments

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okito 10 years ago

Hey! I'm one of the co-founders of Ozlo. Excited to finally to get to share him with you today. If you want early access, sign up here and we'll let you in:

http://ozlo.com?vip=hackernews

  • daveguy 10 years ago

    What's the timeline for an android release? The examples all focus on food. Probably a good call for a focus (everyone eats), but is that the primary focus? ie is it a current limitation? Also agree with rohanpai, an api would interesting.

    • okito 10 years ago

      Hi Dave!

      Android is on our list, but for not for a few months yet. Eventually Ozlo will be in a lot of different channels - including messengers, the web, and Android.

      Ozlo can work over any topic area we let him learn about. We focused on food for the reason you said, but expect to open him up to many new topics soon!

      • plexicle 10 years ago

        Oh, whoops. I signed up but didn't realize it was only for iOS. That's unfortunate, I was interested in checking it out. I should have read more before clicking the link, that's on me.

  • vr3690 10 years ago

    Are you guys using a service for managing the waitlist or did you build it inhouse?

    • okito 10 years ago

      We built it in house. It's pretty tightly integrated with our actual user system.

      • vr3690 10 years ago

        So, I'm curious about this. Does a waitlist with a referral system help increase signups? I'm wondering how's it better than wait lists that don't push you up the line for referring people. Is it worth dedicating resources to build it out?

        • okito 10 years ago

          Referrals don't change your position in line. We are letting people in generally first come, first-served.

          We use the VIP code because there are some times when you need to let someone in immediately (important partner, people that might be able to help us test a specific feature, etc.)

          I think that in general incentivizing people to share by giving them a bump in line feels unfair.

findjashua 10 years ago

I don't mean to undermine your efforts, but google seems to give me mostly the same information. How do you plan to edge them out/differentiate?

  • machinelearning 10 years ago

    From what I can tell, this seems to reduce the cognitive load of a search session way more than using Google (for certain use cases).

    The advantages are: fewer clicks/taps, session state is saved on the page and suggestions reduce typing. They seem like minor things but make a huge difference in practice when you are trying to decide between a few options.

    That being said, curious to see if the team can get handle the limitations of machine learning and maintain the quality of search as it scales.

  • okito 10 years ago

    If Google works for you, stick with it! Ozlo is for those questions where using Google would make you do all the work - like finding the best place for a burger in SOMA or automatically remembering restaurants you wanted to try.

    You can see some added examples in our blog post: https://medium.com/teamozlo/introducing-ozlo-d5cce73d7ba5

robbiet480 10 years ago

I've see this pre-defined select an option chat UI in a few apps now. I wonder if everyone is just duplicating off each other or there is a framework (like Chatto for Swift) that is being used. I've seen this on Quartz, Digit, Square Cash and now Ozlo.

Anyone know what the design pattern is even called?

  • okito 10 years ago

    Hi - we developed our suggestions UI quite some time ago. I think variations are becoming more popular because it's a way of solving the "invisible UI" problem for conversational systems.

    Note that with Ozlo, however, our suggestions are just shortcuts. You can also text Ozlo anything you like by tapping on his avatar in the bottom left corner.

    Many people who build these are actually just doing menu systems.

  • maxerickson 10 years ago

    Why isn't it just a menu?

    • okito 10 years ago

      Our suggestions are more like auto-suggest; you can type anything you want. See above!

  • mwexler 10 years ago

    Annoying.

rohanpai 10 years ago

Looking forward to an API :)

iwillium 10 years ago

How is this different thank Luka? https://luka.ai/

  • okito 10 years ago

    I think Luka has done a great job of exploring a lot of different approaches to this space. We've bet pretty heavily on the idea that most people will want one bot, not a family of them. But it's exciting to see so many people working to make this happen!

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