Inside Wit.ai’s First-Ever Developer Jam
By: Ashley Clarke
Tags: Hackathons, Wit, Witai, Machine Learning, NLP

A special thank you to all of the inspiring innovators who joined us for our first ever Wit.ai Jam!

The week-long, online event brought together leading Wit.ai developers between October 26–30 with the goal of immersing them in AI technology, and supporting them as they created solutions for a Design Challenge.

It was an honor for us to connect with such a dynamic community of AI developers seeking cutting-edge guidance on integrating Wit.ai voice features into their apps.

On each day of the Jam, participants attended live and interactive online sessions where they received direct support from Wit.ai’s product team and engineers.

“Thanks to the Wit.ai team for their excellent guidance during the office hour sessions at the Jam. The trouble-shooting advice I received helped me take my solution to the next level and equipped me with a bunch of learnings to apply to future projects. Having this forum with the AI team personally helped me with the following insights: Firstly, custom models take precedence. Secondly, a built-in entity is a good first guess; DateTime builds on top of ordinal. And finally, there can be multiple apps training at the same time, meaning that built-in entities are trained on a different loop. So glad that the Jam offered me an opportunity to ask these questions, and receive valuable support! Thanks again!”

— Yu Sun

Opportunities during the Jam

Throughout the week, we ran a series of practical learning sessions, while also facilitating opportunities for attendees to receive expert feedback, and share their learnings and ideas.

Office hours

Office hours enabled developers to meet Wit.ai’s very own designers and engineers while receiving tailored advice for the apps they were building. Discussion topics included common mistakes that developers make with voice implementation, and how to make conversation flows feel more natural.

Demo Day

Demo Day was a highlight of the Jam — where everyone could see what their peers had been working on during the week. On the last day of the jam, developers presented their solutions to the Design Challenge through 1–3 minute pre-recorded app demos. The focus was less on completing a fully functioning app, and more on the learning experience. Each team received feedback from Wit.ai designers and engineers on their app design, as well as ideas for features to add, improvements to be made to the conversation flow, and much more.

Lightning talks

Attendees had the opportunity to inspire and connect with their peers by delivering lightning talks — short presentations on tech topics they were passionate about. These talks were an opportunity for developers to showcase their existing Wit.ai apps in the context of real-world scenarios. It was exciting to see how these talks inspired peers by detailing Wit.ai’s potential for solving challenges faced by global developers.

Networking

While we unfortunately couldn’t host the event in person due to the pandemic, that didn’t stop everyone from building new friendships through a special Workplace group — an online space for sharing content and collaboration opportunities.

Every session was recorded to make the event accessible for attendees who were balancing their availability due to time zones and work commitments.

Our speakers

Attendees heard from Wit.ai and Facebook speakers during the event, discussing a range of topics including conversation design and tutorials.

Leveling up: Some tips from our speakers

As many of you know, building an app is more than just the lines of code that go into it. Design can make or break your app. If you have a confusing layout or flow, people will be less likely to use it. This is also true for conversation design in voice apps.

Conversation designer for Facebook Reality Labs, Hilary Hayes, broke down basic concepts of conversation flow and the importance of making a user feel comfortable with your app. Through easy-to-understand charts and examples, developers were able to gain a solid understanding of key concepts. Hilary also reminded us that there are no formal design community guidelines set in this newly emerging field of voice app development, and that we all can be trail blazers.

Hilary Hayes: Conversation Designer, Facebook Reality Labs

Pan Wangperawong and Scott Arnold, both Partner Engineers for Facebook Reality Labs, presented. Pan walked developers through conversation design from a multimodal perspective while also explaining how voice and visual-touch interfaces can complement each other to enhance the user experience. Providing real world examples, such as ordering food from a drive-in to fitness classes, developers were able to see how well constructed conversation design can improve the functionality of their app.

Pan Wangperawong: Partner Engineer, Facebook Reality Labs

Scott presented a tutorial on how to integrate voice into a web application using the Wit.ai Speech API. In this tutorial using HTML and JavaScript, Scott showed developers how to capture, send voice to Wit.ai, and receive a response with the intents based on the recorded content. The app is currently hosted on Glitch where you can see it in action or download the code yourself.

Scott Arnold: Partner Engineer, Facebook Reality Labs

These sessions were recorded and shared in our Workplace group where developers were able to reference them for their own projects.

Nancy Li: Product Manager, Facebook Reality Labs

It was important to the Wit.ai team that developers attending the event not only gained an understanding of conversion design and implementing voice applications integration, but learned more about where Wit.ai is heading. Nancy Li, Product Manager of the Wit.ai developer platform provided this valuable insight from her presentation giving an overview of Wit.ai. Throughout the event, she also provided valuable app feedback, ideas for feature improvements, and insight on what appeals to consumers.

All of the recorded speaker presentations are currently being edited and will be available on the Wit.ai website soon.

Design Challenge

One of the most anticipated experiences in the Jam was our Design Challenge, where we tasked attendees with building a multi-modal Wit.ai experience leveraging visual, touch, and voice commands that integrated one of the following categories:

Day-to-day Basics

Social Coordination

Local Discovery

Media Consumption

Fitness, Voice/AR Navigation

Voice Games, Shopping Assistant

Entertainment

Accessibility

Highlighted Design Challenge projects

We were awestruck by all of the solutions shared in the Challenge. Here’s a snapshot of two that really raised the bar.

ShopRight by Shammah Matasva, Swapnil Madhavi, Daniel Santos, Sandesh Chinchole

ShopRight utilizes Wit.ai for shopping purposes by allowing users to browse with just voice commands. The app works on various devices that can detect voice commands — such as your phone, laptop, or portal devices. You can request what stores you’d like to shop at or search for specific products.

Solution: A voice controlled browsing option that works on various devices to simplify your shopping experience.

ShopRight

Bmatch by Adeoluwa Akinsanya

Bmatch is an app that connects non-remunerated blood donors with matching recipients who are in need of their assistance. Using Facebook Messenger as a platform with Wit.ai, this app provides a unique way to reach out to an audience of potential donors.

Solution: Provide an easy way to access blood from a community of non-profit blood donors.

Bmatch

Let’s keep building!

Thanks again to everyone who participated in our first Wit.ai Jam!

To get involved in our growing community of innovators, and to be kept up-to-date with the latest opportunities including future Wit.ai Jams and challenges, please join our Wit.ai Facebook group.

And as always, for all the latest on building with Wit.ai, please refer to our website here.

We can’t wait to see you at our next event!