These are my fears too. I've been looking at this over the weekend as a possibility to embed a 'bot like feature into my web app, but I would hate my users to get used to it, then have Wit go away like Parse did. Much harder to develop an AI engine from scratch myself than an authentication/database engine.

Give Abot a look (https://github.com/itsabot/abot). It's an MIT-licensed bot framework, and it should do everything you need. Would love your feedback as well--email's in my profile.

Exactly, Parse was a great example. Rather basic service and the outcry was huge. NLP is way harder and maybe even impossible for most developers. But I'm optimistic, that something like wit.ai could be done in an opensource community-driven environment. Projects like SpaCy[0] make NLP easier to use for more developers.

[0] https://spacy.io/

As far as I've seen, this isn't anything you couldn't do with basic classification and NER passes in OpenNLP. Straightforward, even trivial, stuff as far as existing NLP toolsets go.

Wit seems to be heading towards more conversation-oriented (ie multi-message) approach to NLP which is something existing NLP toolsets don't make straightforward. For example, predicting the next action a bot should take based on conversation history is a bit different than just classifying an utterance. There are hints at how to do this in literature, and Init.ai (disclaimer: I work there) is working on it as well, but it's not widespread.

There's also more to this type of slot filling than just NER. Again, the necessary techniques are available in academic literature, but not necessarily turn key. Plus, you need to handle parsing after locating the slots. For the parsing, you can take a look at Duckling (https://duckling.wit.ai/) which Wit did open source.

Both on the classification front and the slot filling, open source toolkits might get you part of the way there but not all the way.

Having a training and management UI is also a substantial value add once you use it.

The voice recognition isn't basic. The Open Source equivalents are no where near as good, unfortunately.

We understand the concern here at Wit. It's free because we no longer need to generate revenue. Wit developers spend time validating data that is critical to improve the models for the Wit community. When we joined Facebook in Jan 2015, we updated our Terms of service to mention that you can retrieve your training data if Wit closes at some point. FYI, the training data (expressions, intents, entities) is the critical component. The plan is to continue supporting and growing the product. The release of Bot Engine Beta a few months ago is a proof.

The fact that you're saying "it's free because we no longer need to generate revenue" is exactly the problem. It means you didn't even think this through. If you had, your answer would be different.

It's just like Twitter saying "We don't need to generate revenue directly from our API and that's why we're opening it all up because what's good for the community is what's good for us!", except that this isn't 2006 and everyone knows better.

It's free because Facebook wants the training data. Pretty obvious I would have thought.

If you're ok with helping Facebook improve its AI then I see no reason to worry about the fact that it is free.

Our vision is to make it easy for developers to make apps or devices that can leverage AI/NLP/Speech. As you probably know, the key is the amount of data you can collect. The more data, the better your models will be, the better you API is. When you are a startup, you need at some point to generate revenue to continue to grow/hire even if you objective is to gather more data

I came to post the exact same comment. I would never lock me in in such a naive manner.

Core components such as AI, or even translation shouldn't be outsourced in my opinion, at the very least to be cost efficient, or as in the case of this product, to avoid dramas which can be foreseen.

Business wise and sustainability wise, reinventing the wheel is more often than not better than using a SaaS. Commodity hardware-as-a-service (servers, service bus etc...) is the only exception (but still is far from being a no brainer).

At the end of the day, after all the time and money we spent in college, we should seek a ROI by implementing academic papers whenever we need to.

> Would never use that. It's free of charge, so how is it financed? Right, its Facebook owned and just like every product of (Google, Facebook, Apple, whatever)

I understand, and agree with your basic sentiment and point. I don't get why you include Apple with Google and Facebook.

Google and Facebook famously make all their money from offering 'free' services and monetising eyeballs on ads.

Apple famously makes all it's money from (traditionally) selling hardware, and recently, through it's digital media stores.

Apple give very little away "for free" - sure, they don't charge for the OS, but its financed by the purchases of hardware, not being a privacy whore.

Included them because they tend to shut down free services. Google shuts down nearly every service companies they buy offer. They are known for doing so on their very own projects as well. Oh and Apple does this as well, for example when they bought Beats, they shut down the Beats API.

> Included them because they tend to shut down free services

What Free service has Apple shut down? Their major that's been around for a while is iCloud/etc, which before was MobileMe, which before was .Mac, which before was iTools.

I don't know the technical details of how those back-end services relate to each other (i.e. evolution from one to the next, being rebranded, or re-built from scratch each time, etc) but there are very few things that they've truly shut down.

For a while after MobileMe and before some of the major improvements to iCloud, Keychain sync was not available, but I'm struggling to think of free services they've actually shut down.

Foundation DB http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/apple-acquires-durable-data... "Apple has acquired FoundationDB, a company that specializes in speedy, durable NoSQL databases, TechCrunch has learned.

A notice on the FoundationDB site notes that it’s no longer offering downloads of its database software. "

Granted, Apple doesn't acquire at Google's or Facebook's rate, so the sample size is smaller

Not a service.

I have the same thoughts. Would love to use it for my business, but I just doesn't feel safe using it, when it can close with no notice at all.

It happened to Parse, but thankfully they open sourced most of it do you can use it as a stand-alone.

You could probably architect your app in a way where you can swap out wit for something else later on, if the need be, without breaking the clients

Technical practicality is probably less of a concern. If you build your business on the availability of cheap (or free) APIs, and then these APIs cease to exist and you are left with very expensive alternatives (or worse, no alternatives at all), your business plan may break down pretty quickly.

The same could happen if the API was paid. In this instance, it's conceivable to setup your own NLP/bot engine with OSS alternatives to do more or less the same. But starting with wit would be much faster and allow you to focus on getting the product market fit right