I've created a tool called Alertfor that scours the open web to find the most relevant and up-to-date answers for complex questions. You can set up alerts to receive continuous updates whenever there are changes or new information becomes available for a given question.
I used an agent framework (Autogen + Sibyl) to collect and answer questions, and I schedule a Celery job to run the same query continuously every six hours.
I would love to hear your feedback, suggestions, or anything else you’d like to say.
Note: I'm submitting this for a second time; I'm not sure if this is against HN policy.
Even a quick screenshot would be better than nothing.
You can find the rules for “Show HN” posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
The only visible message is:
> Made 50% progress on Alertfor. Its getting smarted in collecting web data.
> Alertfor works like this - "You ask question, it find answers in the web then you can tract the answer for changes" (AQTA - ask question track answer)
> Here are some use cases I tested . . .
I’m assuming the demo is a self-reply to create a thread, but those require a Twitter account to view these days.
A demo would be nice too but I might not have done that otherwise.
"Who is the current NBA champion?"
"How many MPs do the Toddies have?"
it has some advanced usage examples. you are right, I will add some sample questions at home page. Thank you.
I have never had an account and i dont click on twitter links, since there is a login wall most of the time.
Im pretty sure im not the only one.
Make things as easy as possible to view for potential users (aka customers). Don't make them open another app/site just to view some demo.
Putting a screenshot on your web page would work a lot better.
Some sort of organization of queries into categories would be nice.
Most of my queries don't need to be checked every 6 hours. Some are fine being checked weekly.
You could have a free tier with limited numbers of queries and 24-hour interval to attract new customers.
Someone else mentioned public quereis being free. If I can still get a personal notification for those, then you only spend on sending notifications and not re-running the query for many users. If my needs are served by public queries alone I may not subscribe. I'd weight the risks.
Different methods of receiving notifications are usually only needed for enterprises. I'd weight the benefits of doing that for non-enterprise customers because the cost of debugging is high (think hooking that up to AWS SQS or, worse, some proprietary webhook).
I've added all suggestions from entire thread to my log and will prioritize implementing them.
Regarding pricing, I don't know offering a free tier is right approach or not .. I believe that the queries are complex and long. not sure they could be shared among users. Anyways, for next 2 or 3 months its going to be beta. my current focus is adding value, will ask the users about pricing later. Note that, for each question, it crawls 10-15 pages, or even more if you ask to enrich a table. there is LLM cost, now a days webpages are really huge.
Thank you again for your input and support. Please let me know if you have any other thoughts or questions.
I think the one in your demo about the MacBook prices is a good one. Something that fluctuates not every hour/day or at least the user doesn't care because it's going to stay the same for a few days at least.
At a large enough scale I imagine you'd see a long tail effect where most of the queries will be then same and then there will be many queries by one or a few users.
Having some kind of dashboard for common queries would be cool.
A generic version of https://istheshipstillstuck.com/
Source:
Bing search results for "events of animal to human transmission of avian influenza H5N1 in the USA since March 2024" Bing search results for "avian influenza H5N1 USA news July 2024" Bing search results for "historical cases of avian influenza H5N1 animal to human transmission USA" Bing search results for "CDC avian influenza H5N1 updates" Bing search results for "WHO avian influenza H5N1 updates" Date Time: July 29, 2024, 5:49 a.m.
Kindly try now with same question. I made some changes. I use Bing API as a initial resource selector. there were some issues. fixed it.
Instead of asking simple questions like "Who is the current NBA champion?", I would like to approach this project as a complex data collector.
For example:
I live in Seattle and want to buy a MacBook Pro with the following specifications: - 8-Core CPU - 10-Core GPU - 16GB Unified Memory - 1TB SSD Storage
Can you compare online prices and provide me with a report?
Alert Setup: Please alert me if there are any price drops in any store.
I also have many ideas similar to this using LLMs. They're not money makers. But they do solve personal problems for me. However, my ideas are usually bottlenecked by context size, $/token, or models not being capable enough. Luckily, all 3 are improving at an incredible pace.
For example. Query: What is the temperature in Seattle? Answer: 17°C Alert Setup: Alert me if it reaches 23°C.
The app continuously monitors the source for updates on the queried information. In this example, the temperature data is regularly checked against the alert condition set by the user.
The real-time aspect depends on how frequently we scrape data using scheduled jobs. Currently, the app checks the data at set intervals (6 hours) to ensure timely notifications.
Langchain is a library specifically designed to facilitate the development of applications using LLMs. It provides tools and utilities to build complex NLP pipelines with ease.
Alertfor is a SaaS product that combines LLMs with agents to provide automated search.
Does this answer your question ?
Asked if there were any available 3 bedroom units currently for rent in my building
There aren’t in reality
But service came back saying there were 4
for e.g any available 3 bedroom units currently for rent in Seattle use these resources: Zillow, redfin, realtors.
It would be useful to have a language to specify exactly what kind of event triggers an alert (e.g. regex, presence/absence of keyword or phrase, or domain from SERP).
Obviously, it needs some work (especially judging from all the comments here). You already added an example to the homepage, but my feedback would be:
1. Add more examples of possible alerts. You can honestly just look at the Zapier homepage and copy how they show examples.
2. Include pricing information. I see the "create account" button, but I don't know how much you'll charge (If you don't charge, let me know if I need to add my API keys).
Still, it's a cool idea. It reminds me of existing tools that alert you to flight price changes, Amazon product price changes, etc... There's definitely something here.
1. Currently, it's a proof of concept only. In the next release, I will make sure to include some use cases/examples.
2. I haven’t finalized the pricing yet. For now, it's free. When I release, the starting price will be around $7-10 per ~200 runs/questions. I’m also considering offering a free tier; I’ll work that out later. Thank you.
I've heard the leaders of the foundational models say a similar thing: bet on the technology getting better. That is, if your business idea becomes less valuable given a smarter model then it isn't a good business idea. Alternatively, if your business idea becomes more valuable given a smarter model then it is a good business idea. (Not that I totally trust them, but this does seem like good advice)
So, even if your current product has some issues now with the diff provided by current models - consider that it will only get better as the models get better.
You are going to see a lot of competition in this space.
The quality of LLM does not improve my product much, I am facing extraction issues, will have to improve continually.
"You are going to see a lot of competition in this space." I welcome them all :)
focus on a promising niche that has a problem and is willing to spend money on it is often regarded as best practice. many successful companies have been built on this principle. Unfortunately, this approach has never worked for me. I have worked on many products and followed these best practices, but I have yet to see success. Over the past 12+ years, I have experimented these best practices but nothing has worked. It would work for founders who has good networking /connections, living in CA, best in marketing, have good followers in Social media etc. Founder like me have no such assets. this is a big chicken or egg problem.
Instead, I decided to take a different approach and I create imaginative products based on ideas I'm passionate about and publish them continuously. If there is an interest, I then optimize the product for the interested customers, taking their feedback into account and continuing development accordingly.
Are you intentionally being vague about HOW it finds/decides on the best answer?
Do you need more details about How it finds the answer? I already shared most of the part in this thread.
The home page was done in 60 minutes, the whole product was done in 3 days. I was testing and releasing without any intention.
