[HN Gopher] Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and uni...
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Show HN: Open-source conversational platform and unified messaging
APIs
Author : skandergarroum
Score : 92 points
Date : 2021-06-09 10:09 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (airy.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (airy.co)
| skandergarroum wrote:
| Hey HN!
|
| After four years of development, we are happy to share Airy with
| you.
|
| Airy is an Open Source Conversational Platform to store,
| structure and utilize conversational data in a secure and
| privacy-compliant way.
|
| With Airy, you can integrate with Conversational AI like Rasa to
| train smarter models based on actual conversations.
|
| You can host your own open source messaging API to enable your
| developers to build conversational experiences even for privacy-
| sensitive industries, such as banking, insurance or healthcare.
| Airy's core platform is fully open source and runs in your own
| cloud or even on premise.
|
| We built Airy on Apache Kafka for ultimate scalability, so you
| can ingest and stream all kinds of conversational data to:
|
| unify your messaging channels include human agents via an Inbox
| UI gain insights from Conversational Analytics
|
| Airy has connectors for conversational sources such as:
|
| Facebook Messenger & Instagram Google's Business Messages
| WhatsApp Business API SMS (via Twilio) Airy Open Source Chat
| Plugin Custom sources
|
| Check out a short intro video of Airy here:
| https://youtu.be/zwDosYHitYg
|
| You can start trying it out by reading on our website:
| https://airy.co/ph
|
| If you like what we are doing, please give us a star on Github:
| https://github.com/airyhq/airy
|
| And we are of course happy to answer your questions!
| habibur wrote:
| Couldn't really find pricing info in the pricing page.
| shoellinger wrote:
| Yeah, maybe the word "free" in "Free Open Source
| Conversational Infrastructure with Apache 2.0 license" isn't
| prominent enough. ;)
|
| For Airy Enterprise and Managed Cloud, we usually like to
| listen to a potential customer's use case first and come up
| with a custom pricing that makes sense for both sides,
| usually containing fixed licensing options, volume-based
| components or even location-based pricing which can make a
| lot of sense for multi-location enterprises, but rarely works
| for e-commerce companies.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Any plans to integrate with Teams?
| skandergarroum wrote:
| hey artificialLimbs! Yes, a Teams integration is on the
| roadmap, as we plan to support all conversational channels
| and our data model already supports it. We are working our
| way through potential channels as we speak, the Teams API was
| in beta until recently.
|
| If you don't want to wait you can also build your own custom
| source for Teams in Airy. Take a look at our docs to get
| started: https://airy.co/docs/core/sources/introduction
|
| We can also jump on a quick tech demo if the need is urgent.
| ROARosen wrote:
| Hi, looks very promising. I would totally consider switching to
| this streamlined approach to business conversations. However, I
| don't see any mention of email. Email is IMHO vital for any
| service that wishes to 'integrate' the full company
| conversation stack. Do you plan on adding additional
| integrations?
| chrismatic wrote:
| This is a great point! Email is and will remain _the_
| messaging use case for any business. I've created a ticket
| for adding email as a messaging source so you can track the
| progress: https://github.com/airyhq/airy/issues/1953
|
| And yes we do plan on adding more sources and are therefore
| listening to the community to learn which are most in-demand.
| So thank you very much for the feedback!
| ROARosen wrote:
| I'll be on the lookout... Tnx!
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| congrats! excited to check it out. Also kudso to the apache 2.0
| this makes it even better.
| skandergarroum wrote:
| Thanks jFriedensreich! Yes, we are seeing Apache 2.0 as the
| gold standard for open source licenses and are happy to use
| it.
| ushakov wrote:
| very nice! congrats
|
| i have built a similiar thing in the past, called Dialogflow
| Gateway (https://dialogflow.cloud.ushakov.co), which connects
| Dialogflow to Web and E-Mail protocols, also open-source
|
| check out my gh profile: https://github.com/mishushakov
|
| i'd be very happy to hear from you, if you're interested in
| joining forces/collaborating :)
| skandergarroum wrote:
| Hey there! @Dialogflow Gateway: nice idea and cool showoff
| cases.
|
| Got some ideas on collaborating, send you an email.
| klpu wrote:
| Go compare with https://mixin.one/messenger?
| skandergarroum wrote:
| Airy is a conversational platform, built mostly for businesses:
| most enterprises have a variety of conversational apps and
| channels they support (from Facebook Messenger & Instagram for
| Customer Service to their own livechat for sales, etc). Airy
| helps these businesses bundle these channels, store the
| conversations and power the different usecases.
|
| It looks like Mixin is an open source cryptocurrency wallet
| that also has peer to peer chat and a desktop version. So the
| only common points I see is that both projects are Open Source
| and use chat as an interface.
| renrutal wrote:
| > Airy Enterprise
|
| > * E2E Encryption & Storage
|
| This worries me, I believe it's unethical and irresponsible to
| pay-wall privacy features.
|
| We live in a world where companies and governments are actively
| spying and harming those under them.
| cvwright wrote:
| > We live in a world where companies and governments are
| actively spying and harming those under them.
|
| Therefore this random company owes you security features for
| free?
|
| Users wanting free shit is the reason why companies like Google
| and Facebook are doing all this spying in the first place.
| Those huge warehouse-size datacenters don't pay for themselves.
| junon wrote:
| > Therefore this random company owes you security features
| for free?
|
| Yes.
| donpark wrote:
| I'd agree in general for consumer use-cases but not for
| business use-cases. With an open source business tool that may
| be used in non-business context, charging for features required
| for business use makes sense.
|
| Even among consumer use-cases, lack of privacy may be a
| feature. In spatial chat, for example, being in able to
| overhear conversation within 'earshot' is a feature. Selling
| private space in that context makes sense and similar to
| selling improved voice quality, at least to me, and there are
| stark operational cost boundaries in the involved tech that can
| complicates the picture.
| pascal-holy wrote:
| Hi renrutal, Pascal from Airy here. Encryption is a very
| important topic for us. Since in all our versions all of the
| data resides in Apache Kafka and is only exposed via Kafka
| Streams Apps we are able to take advantage of Kafkas SSL
| encryption. For encryption-at-rest we use our cloud providers
| disk encryption. We also support Open ID Connect as an identity
| layer so we can focus on improving our platform and be assured
| that our authentication is always up to date and secure. You
| raise a good point though and we will continue innovating to
| make encryption accessible to everyone.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Is that E2E, though? I'm not Kafka-knowledgeable, but that
| sounds like it's encrypted as it gets to your servers and
| encrypted as it rests on them -- not encrypted all the way
| between people sending messages.
| shoellinger wrote:
| Hi renrutal, Steffen from Airy here. Thanks for your remark and
| I couldn't agree more with you which is why we don't pay-wall
| privacy features. Actually, nothing stops you from turning on
| encryption also in the open source version of Airy as Pascal
| pointed out above.
|
| The topic you mentioned above comes from our pricing page for
| the Airy Enterprise Edition and is about an additional (!) and
| fully optional conversational data store for archiving
| conversations and to provide for conversational analytics use
| cases. We currently only offer this additional streaming option
| for enterprise customers with large amounts of conversational
| data by leveraging data lakes on economic cloud storage
| solutions like AWS S3. We strongly recommend to activate
| server-side encryption for this storage option.
|
| Here's a blog post we wrote about the relevant topic of
| utilizing data lakes as a long-term solution to store
| conversational data: https://blog.airy.co/introducing-data-
| lakes-for-conversation...
|
| If you have further suggestions how to improve privacy features
| in the interest of all users, we are of course happy to discuss
| them.
| taktsu wrote:
| Not sure but if this product can deal with LINE, that would be
| awesome.
| [deleted]
| skandergarroum wrote:
| In principle Airy supports all conversational channels, and
| built some premade connectors for the major ones.
|
| In the Facebook ecosystem we currently have connectors and docs
| for Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp for example.
| https://airy.co/docs/core/sources/introduction
|
| Line is on our list, and should be up in a short while.
|
| Till we have an official connector ready you can also always
| use a custom source to connect Line.
| bachmeier wrote:
| A bit of advice. When someone clicks on "Pricing" there should be
| information involving dollars (or another currency depending on
| where you're located).
| judge2020 wrote:
| For certain products it can make sense to only provide services
| on an as-needed basis with pricing tailored to how much you
| think it'll cost to run the service for that customer plus some
| margin. For this I think it's less like that (seems like a
| Zapier clone for chat, based on my initial impression).
| 9dev wrote:
| In my previous job I was the lead engineer of the MessengerPeople
| Unified Messaging API, so congrats, this looks awesome! :)
|
| I wonder how you solved media files and attachments? I remember
| having major headaches around transporting, storing and
| retrieving media files for different messaging backends,
| especially WhatsApp and Telegram.
|
| Also, any plans to support WhatsApp Business containers directly?
| chrismatic wrote:
| Hi, Chris from Airy here. Glad that you like it!
|
| Yes this was a very challenging problem. After many iterations
| we came to the conclusion that in general it's best to have no
| opinion on the structure of the content that is being sent. So
| we store every message exactly as we receive it and do platform
| specific file interactions in a separate stream. We then store
| the results in a metadata topic and use that to render messages
| on-demand. This immutable approach makes retrying and storage
| migrations easy and safe.
|
| Regarding WhatsApp Business containers we are still waiting for
| them to wrap up their Beta. Currently we support WhatsApp and
| SMS via our Twilio messaging source
| (https://airy.co/docs/core/sources/whatsapp-twilio), but we
| definitely plan on making it a first class citizen.
|
| Hope I could answer your questions! :)
| michaelagustin wrote:
| With every messaging and conversational product I fear that the
| pricing is volume based, the more conversations, the more you
| pay. How does Airy handle pricing?
| shoellinger wrote:
| Thank you for that question, michaelagustin. You are right:
| most popular SaaS tools in the conversational space are indeed
| priced per volume, usually per message or per (active)
| conversation.
|
| As communication is core to every business, we strongly believe
| every company should own their conversations and utilize their
| conversational data in the best possible way, taking the
| interest and privacy of their customers into consideration.
|
| We believe there is a unique opportunity now in the market to
| create an open source conversational stack and we would like to
| contribute to it with something we are good at and have a lot
| of experience in. Our goal is to create an open standard for
| the processing and storing of conversational data which is why
| we went open source.
|
| This situation is perfectly suited from our perspective for an
| open core pricing model where we will continue to give away our
| Airy open source core platform for free under an Apache 2.0
| license and sell additional enterprise licenses for optional
| features like advanced routing capabilities, team management,
| advanced storage and analytics solutions on top to enterprises
| that have additional requirements and more organizational
| complexity to deal with. Enterprises can run Airy Core + Airy
| Enterprise in their own private cloud or even on premise for
| privacy sensitive industries like banking, insurance or
| healthcare.
|
| For business teams that want the full power of a conversational
| platform like Airy, but can't or don't want to dedicate
| engineering resources on their end, we also offer a fully
| managed Airy Cloud solution on the side. Because each Airy
| instance is fully independent, we can even offer this service
| in any region in case the relevant customer has preferences
| e.g. to store their conversational data exclusively in the EU
| or in a specific country or data center.
| soorajchandran wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. We have been using Chatwoot
| (https://chatwoot.com/) - an open source solution for customer
| messaging. Great to see all the open source project. How are you
| differentiating Airy?
| shoellinger wrote:
| Thank you for the question, soorajchandran. We appreciate to
| see more open source tools in this space and believe that
| Chatwoot is a great choice when you are primarily looking for a
| cost efficient alternative to Intercom, Zendesk or basic
| contact center software with a UI for customer support agents.
|
| What you get with Airy is enterprise-scale conversational
| infrastructure that can power millions of conversations
| simultaneously by ingesting messaging events in Apache Kafka,
| running in a dedicated Kubernetes cluster to stream and process
| conversational data for a variety of use cases, such as
| integrating with Conversational AI platforms or storing all
| your conversations in a data lake to run conversational
| analytics or train machine learning models based on actual
| conversations.
|
| In that sense what we do is more like "Segment" for
| conversational data.
|
| In our approach, we would rather like to integrate with for
| example live chat plugins provided by Intercom instead of
| replacing them at companies that already chose Intercom to
| serve their customers with a live chat plugin on their website
| or in their mobile apps. Airy also comes with a fully
| customizable open source live chat plugin and an Inbox UI for
| human agents, but it's not at the core of what we do.
|
| We believe there is much more value to be gained from utilizing
| conversational data and we therefore like to integrate and play
| well with other solutions in the space as we believe that
| companies should have the freedom to choose the tech stack that
| best suits their requirements and budget restrictions.
| melenaos wrote:
| Hey, congrats on the launch! it seems really nice and helpful. I
| was thinking of creating something similar for the communication
| channels of my SAAS applications.
|
| Is this product for small size businesses? Does it need a single
| cloud vm or it need several servers and services, a ton of
| configuration and an IT degree to manage it?
| shoellinger wrote:
| In general, Airy is mostly targeted at mid market companies and
| enterprises that deal with a lot of conversations, e.g. we
| helped a European retail company to launch conversational
| experiences on Google Search and Google Maps for their central
| customer support team and their 1,800 local stores
| (https://businessmessages.google/success-stories/tedi/).
|
| Airy gives you an enterprise-grade communication
| infrastructure, running in a Kubernetes cluster, for example
| EKS with several virtual machines when you are running on AWS.
| Our recommended initial setup consists out of two c5.xlarge EC2
| instances. This should be powerful enough to handle several
| conversational sources and a few hundred thousand conversations
| per month. We also have a few rather large SMBs among our
| customers, but the average SMB rarely gets to such amounts of
| conversational traffic yet.
|
| Installing Airy is rather easy and can be done with our Airy
| CLI to set up a remote cloud instance from your local machine
| with a single command e.g. in AWS ("airy create
| --provider=aws").
|
| We also have a tutorial detailing the individual steps to get
| an Airy instance up and running, and also properly secured of
| course: https://blog.airy.co/tutorial-airy-installation-aws/
| valevk wrote:
| How do you compare with https://matrix.org/?
| shoellinger wrote:
| We love Matrix for their big vision to build an open network
| for secure, decentralized communication.
|
| Airy has a more centralized approach from the perspective of a
| single organization. We want to give organizations an easy way
| to access all conversational data across their entire
| organization in a structured form and help them to utilize it,
| e.g. to train smarter machine learning models in the interest
| of their customers.
|
| This is reflected in our mission of structuring the world's
| conversational data to power the future of customer
| experiences.
| lazyresearcher wrote:
| How does Airy compare to Jovo (https://github.com/jovotech/jovo-
| framework) other than supporting different channels (Jovo seems
| more focused on voice whilst airy on text?)?
| shoellinger wrote:
| According to my understanding, Jovo seems to be a rather light-
| weigh framework based on Javascript/Typescript to build voice
| experiences e.g. for Alexa, Google Assistant, etc. I have not
| tried it out yet, but it seems to be a cool project to build
| these kinds of experiences primarily around voice.
|
| In comparison, Airy is a much more resource-intense backend
| service running conversational infrastructure that you couldn't
| run on comparable hardware. Airy is designed to run in the
| cloud giving you a Kubernetes cluster with all the components
| to stream conversational data at enterprise-scale. For now, we
| primarily focus on text-based communication, but could
| theoretically also support transcription and processing of
| voice based messages or live videos.
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