[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a tool to receive alerts when answer...
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       Show HN: I made a tool to receive alerts when answers change
        
       Hi HN,  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.
        
       Author : saran945
       Score  : 56 points
       Date   : 2024-07-28 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.alertfor.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.alertfor.com)
        
       | saran945 wrote:
       | To clarify, my app is the equivalent of SearchGPT + web alerts,
       | using in-app notifications rather than email alerts.
        
         | pomatic wrote:
         | An interesting idea! So - is my query dependant on the latest
         | scrape date for <whatever> AI? If yes, then this has an obvious
         | problem in that cadence for AI scraping is vague at best. If
         | the answer is 'no' -- where are your sourcing the answer to the
         | question I am asking?
        
           | saran945 wrote:
           | The answers provided by the app are sourced directly from the
           | web, and the LLM is used as 1. tool learner/selector 2. query
           | interpreter 3. page understanding and response generation.
           | The answer includes citations from the sources used.
           | 
           | For example. Query: What is the temperature in Seattle?
           | Answer: 17degC Alert Setup: Alert me if it reaches 23degC.
           | 
           | 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.
        
             | laurentlb wrote:
             | Using shorter intervals could be a premium feature.
        
       | playingalong wrote:
       | The page would benefit a lot from an example or two.
       | 
       | "Who is the current NBA champion?"
       | 
       | "How many MPs do the Toddies have?"
        
         | saran945 wrote:
         | I linked to my tweet from home page -
         | https://x.com/saran945/status/1815053542610067487
         | 
         | it has some advanced usage examples. you are right, I will add
         | some sample questions at home page. Thank you.
        
           | PhilippGille wrote:
           | X only shows the single linked tweet, not the thread or
           | comments, to users that are not logged in. It's not a good
           | way to share information on the web anymore, if it ever was.
        
             | saran945 wrote:
             | I did without thinking much, links are dead within social
             | media. I will do the changes.
        
           | colonwqbang wrote:
           | Twitter now demands log in to view tweets in many cases. This
           | immediately turns off people who aren't regular twitter users
           | - something to be aware of.
        
       | oezi wrote:
       | Some public Alerts would be cool to showcase the idea.
       | Potentially publicly visible alerts could be free.
       | 
       | A generic version of https://istheshipstillstuck.com/
        
         | saran945 wrote:
         | Typically users prefer to have their Queries private, may be I
         | should add public/private flag, and make all public alerts as
         | searchable/free to follow. Thank you for suggestion.
        
           | duncanfwalker wrote:
           | That's your Premium tier right there
        
       | aurareturn wrote:
       | Love seeing these creative ideas using LLMs to solve existing
       | problems - however small the problem may be.
       | 
       | 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.
        
         | saran945 wrote:
         | "Love seeing these creative ideas using LLMs to solve existing
         | problems" - yeah, since web wasn't improve as semantic web, I
         | have to use LLM to traverse, understand and collect the web
         | data.
        
         | NotMichaelBay wrote:
         | Could you share your ideas? I've had a few that I don't think
         | are monetizable either but help solve personal problems, like
         | something to help normalize recipes for cooking and to help
         | remember things around home/health maintenance. I'm interested
         | in hearing what others have come up with.
        
       | muratsu wrote:
       | Interesting idea, how do you decide if the answer has changed? Or
       | to put it differently, which types of questions do you think this
       | works best? eg stock price changes every second VS presidential
       | elections are every few years
        
         | saran945 wrote:
         | Not suitable for real-time data changes. Although I can
         | schedule the scraper to run every minute, this is not an ideal
         | use case for such a setup. This approach is more suitable for
         | web page data that changes every few hours.
         | 
         | 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.
        
           | theshaper wrote:
           | A baby custobot!
        
       | jll29 wrote:
       | Neat. Such services ("delta filters" in information filtering, a
       | sub-part of information retrieval, "diff alerts" in Web mining,
       | another sub-part of information retrieval) are useful to
       | implement anything from price comparison to legal canaries (cf.
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary).
       | 
       | 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).
        
         | saran945 wrote:
         | Currently, I compare the previous & current answers (with clue)
         | and send both to the LLM to determine if an alert is required
         | for the given alert-task (question + Clue). I should admit that
         | in some corner cases, such as when comparing list page answers,
         | it is not working as expected. I suppose to parse those list as
         | pre-processing step. The alert is triggered on the clue that
         | you give while creating alert.
        
       | bigyikes wrote:
       | I tried to sign up but never got a confirmation email.
        
         | saran945 wrote:
         | this is strange. I saw emails signups and sending emails
         | recently. kindly try with other email. if the problem persists
         | please communicate me saran@tealme.com
        
       | colonwqbang wrote:
       | A public demo of some kind is necessary. I saw nothing that was
       | available to view without registration. This made me lose
       | interest very quickly.
       | 
       | Even a quick screenshot would be better than nothing.
        
         | saran945 wrote:
         | my bad, Sure, will make one and upload soon. I did not expect
         | this much interest.
        
       | gravity2060 wrote:
       | I absolutely love this and I have a use case right now. In terms
       | of pricing, what are you thinking?. Wow, this is very cool.
        
         | saran945 wrote:
         | its free during beta (may be 2 or 3 months). pricing will be
         | around $10 for basic version (200 job runs or questions per
         | month), my current focus is collecting all the feedbacks in my
         | log to fix it. . .
        
       | adamontherun wrote:
       | My use case failed
       | 
       | 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
        
         | saran945 wrote:
         | It is an expected behavior. context is missing. if you know any
         | websites that has your request then you may mention it in your
         | query with context. so that you can force the agent to look the
         | info you need.
         | 
         | for e.g any available 3 bedroom units currently for rent in
         | Seattle use these resources: Zillow, redfin, realtors.
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-28 23:03 UTC)