New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: If you could talk to a database in plain English, would you?
Ask HN: If you could talk to a database in plain English, would you?
4 by brochington | 13 comments on Hacker News.
For the past 6 months I’ve been working on a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) API. Essentially the request would contain a plain english sentence, and the response would include a breakdown of actions, entities, agents, location, temporal, logic, etc. My hope was that I could create a “Stripe/Twilio for NLU”, but recent feedback has been that it’s more a “technology”, and less a “product”. It would still require a lot of development work to create anything of value for an end user. While I see the value of an API, I also agree with their sentiment, and so I’ve begun exploring problems to apply my API to. One use case that tends to pop up frequently is “text-to-database”. Similar to text-to-SQL, but with my API I could target any DB regardless of query language. This would require a large amount of work, and I’m not convinced that it’s something that users even want. The strongest feedback I’ve received has been that it would be a convenient method for managers and non-technical to query analytics databases. Is this a path worth exploring? Are there industries or positions that would kill to be able to query a db with a plain english sentence? Is this something that you would use, or want to implement?
4 by brochington | 13 comments on Hacker News.
For the past 6 months I’ve been working on a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) API. Essentially the request would contain a plain english sentence, and the response would include a breakdown of actions, entities, agents, location, temporal, logic, etc. My hope was that I could create a “Stripe/Twilio for NLU”, but recent feedback has been that it’s more a “technology”, and less a “product”. It would still require a lot of development work to create anything of value for an end user. While I see the value of an API, I also agree with their sentiment, and so I’ve begun exploring problems to apply my API to. One use case that tends to pop up frequently is “text-to-database”. Similar to text-to-SQL, but with my API I could target any DB regardless of query language. This would require a large amount of work, and I’m not convinced that it’s something that users even want. The strongest feedback I’ve received has been that it would be a convenient method for managers and non-technical to query analytics databases. Is this a path worth exploring? Are there industries or positions that would kill to be able to query a db with a plain english sentence? Is this something that you would use, or want to implement?
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