Idea: extend with web knowledge about betty

[pickhardt]

It looks like this routes the phrases to other services, like Wolfram Alpha, Answers.com, etc.

Do you have a list of all the possible services it gets routed to?

Also, does it route them all in parallel? Is there a SLA on how long someone's command could get left hanging?

I like it but need to understand it better before using it in this.

Related doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dVG_B5Sc2x-fi1pN6iJJjfF1bJY6KEFzUqjOb8NsntI/edit

[pickhardt]

See also PR #7 at #7

[cheniel]

Isn't the point of Betty to quickly help you with figuring out/remembering commands? I feel like pulling information from the web to answer questions is better done in an interface that isn't the command line, such as with Siri and Alfred.

e.g. I just sent a pull request added date and time commands to Betty. The point of this isn't at all to make it easy for the user to figure out the time, but to make it easy for the user to see and run the command he/she would have to type if they forgot how to, for example, display just the month using Date.

[pannous]

@pickhardt thanks for looking into it + good questions
Yes about 100 different 'handlers' are queried in parallel, with prioritized return order
The average response time is between .6 and .9 seconds
The internal timeout is depending on the question, global maximum four seconds.

@cheniel The bigger vision of Betty seams to be more like a "voice operating system". I agree that most commands are probably better served locally. However instead of limiting Betty to local man pages why not get the help of the web to answer questions? Also see the interesting 'howdoi' project: https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi

[pickhardt]

@cheniel Yes, but as pannous said it'd be great if it could respond to human language input, whether thats a command or a question. However, I don't want it to default fallthrough to web knowledge for now.

I am planning to add user preferences that will be useful for handling this. For instance, when you first run it with a command it doesn't understand, it'll say "I don't know. Do you want me to try web knowledge?" - and if you say yes, then it will save your preference so you don't have to keep saying yes all the time.

[cheniel]

@pickhardt Ah, that's a good way to handle it. Parsing queries for "search the web" or adding a command-line option that forces or disables using web knowledge could supplement that as well.

[pannous]

Idea: For inputs matching "what is ...", "calculate ...", "how ..." make it default. For all other queries as suggested by you, via preference or ask.

[pickhardt]

Closing since web mode is now in master. More info: "betty turn web mode on" then "betty what is the weather in minneapolis"