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A comment on Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app by thom on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @05:25AM (#5360941)
Yup, this is a big issue, and obviously our lives would be easier if everyone was happy for us to just gobble up their data. As I've mentioned elsewhere, we want to enable a scenario where we know your schema and ontology, and can therefore generate the query. That allows us to query on your network, but as you say, there's still a huge trust issue.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the minimum desirable interaction here - is an API that just translates natural language to, say, SQL useful enough for you to pay for?

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Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app by neya on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @05:28AM (#5360951)
> is an API that just translates natural language to, say, SQL useful enough for you to pay for?

Definitely!

If you get the natural language to SQL right, then it is multitudes easier for me as a developer to parse a JSON and display the results to an interface than having to learn the natural language processing part by myself and then try to interact and implement with it!

EDIT: I wanted your email. Nevermind, I found it.

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Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app by thom on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @05:35AM (#5360977)
I'll add that as an option on the survey actually, ta. The primary thing we need to know right now are realistic integration scenarios.
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Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app by jahewson on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @07:08AM (#5361138)
Yes an API or library for text > SQL is well worth paying for. Enterprise library in Java something like $2k per install for internal use, $10k for use on a web server would fairly standard. Bare in mind that a lot of enterprises use ORMs which you may need to interoperable with.

The tricky bit is going to be your enterprise sales channel, you need someone with the right connections.

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Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app by huhtenberg on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @06:39AM (#5361075)
Consider a productized, installable version.
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Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app by thom on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @06:51AM (#5361096)
Yeah, that's a decent option. We'll already have the problem of supporting software in the customer's environment, so it's not really a huge leap to imagine a fully local version or an appliance.
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Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app by huhtenberg on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @07:57AM (#5361280)
An appliance :)

It might be a completely worthless idea, but I would consider offering a "USB Stick" version rather than an appliance. It is much easier to replace, costs close to nothing, yet it can still be implemented as a self-contained blackbox with no customer serviceable parts.

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Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app by thom on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @10:16AM (#5361914)
It's got to be a Raspberry Pi, surely?
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Re:Show HN: Delver, a natural language interface to your app by huhtenberg on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @07:58AM (#5361287)
@slmt - you are shadow-banned.
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