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 | 9 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?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How can Utilize Call Center Outsourcing for Increase your Business Income well?

Image
Call center outsourcing is not uncommon however, not every company can live up to the expectations of a great client. The service provider should have the ability to assist you obtain access to new abilities and competences in order to help you achieve efficiency and effectiveness in your company. Digital office providers assist business in providing unique, innovative solutions that are intended to custom-fit your personal small business needs. Some back office service providers also have fully-developed outbound calling and telemarketing services that you can utilize. The world has taken a huge leap with the technological revolution. What was impossible before now seems to be a matter of seconds. As we see more and more start-ups and digital companies emerging, we need to understand how we can account the rising number of BPO companies that can be helpful to us. Running a call center internally may be an expensive affair particularly when it...
Read more

New ask Hacker News story: Is someone trying to steal credit for inventing the eTicket?

Is someone trying to steal credit for inventing the eTicket? 2 by rexarex | 0 comments on Hacker News. The eTicket is what we use for flights today instead of physical, paper tickets printed on special paper. My understanding of the lore is that it was invented by Southwest Airlines or a company they acquired. That's what I heard on a How I Built This podcast episode with the founder of JetBlue. It's also mentioned in this research paper here https://ift.tt/RB63DSb Strangely, when I was googling I found what I suspect to be planted misinformation in a Bangkok Post article where someone named Joel Goheen claims to have invented the eTicket on JRG Airlines (https://ift.tt/bTyawJM). JRG Airlines does not exist, and appear to be just the initials of Joel R Goheen. However, he appears on a U.S. Patent for eTicketing for 1994 the same time they started using eTickets. (https://ift.tt/tzSTHf2) I think it's really strange. I did some googling of his name and eTicket and there ap...
Read more