[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Inkeep (YC W23) - Copilot for Support (th...
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Launch HN: Inkeep (YC W23) - Copilot for Support (think Cursor for
help desks)
Hi HN, We're Nick and Robert, founders of Inkeep
(https://inkeep.com). We help companies turn their content into AI
support copilots. So far, we'd focused on customer-facing
experiences (e.g. find us as an "Ask AI" button in the docs of
companies like Anthropic and Pinecone). Today, we're excited to
share our new copilot, Keep, which is designed specifically for
support agents. It's a conversational sidebar you can use as an
app for Zendesk or Chrome Extension for any support platform.
There's a demo video at https://vid.inkeep.com/cx-copilot or you
can try the live sandbox with example tickets at
https://try.inkeep.com/cx-copilot. Why? Most AI support tools
today are focused on trying to have AI answer customer questions
before they even reach support teams ('deflection'). We'd focused
on that too. However, we heard from many of our customers that
while they care about deflection, they care even more about
providing high-quality, fast human support when users need it. Some
teams don't even want customer-facing AI at all and just want AI
tools to help their team be more efficient. We created Keep with
these scenarios in mind. Keep does a few neat things we haven't
seen elsewhere: 1. Provides intelligent suggestions: if Keep is
confident, it'll create a draft answer and tell you the sources it
used. If the ticket is long, it'll summarize the conversation so
far and outline the remaining to-dos. All automatic and contextual
to the ticket. 2. Is fully conversational: ask for clarifications,
revise draft answers, and iterate as needed. 3. Uses 'Generative
UI': suggestions are rendered as glanceable, interactive UI
components. For example, a draft answer has buttons like "Shorten"
& "Concise" that prompt the AI to revise the answer. UI components
are interweaved within normal text. 4. Turns tickets into FAQs:
can generate an FAQ from a closed ticket and lets you iterate on it
and save it when done. 5. Leverages many content types: uses your
docs, help center, previous support tickets, Slack threads, etc.
We were inspired by tools like Cursor, Claude Artifacts, and v0.
These experiences go beyond plain-text conversations by
interweaving interactive code blocks or UI previews into their
answers. This makes answers digestible and intuitive (and fun) to
iterate on. Some technical details, for those interested: We use
the Vercel AI SDK to optimistically stream the React components by
using our Chat APIs, which are powered by Claude Sonnet 3.5 and our
RAG service. Our APIs follow the OpenAI chat completion format so
are generally compatible with any LLM tooling. Our `inkeep-qa` API
generates draft answers and the `inkeep-context` API generates
structured outputs and tool calls (docs: https://go.inkeep.com/ai-
api). For an example of how these APIs are used, check out our
Intelligent Support Form example (demo: https://try.inkeep.com/ai-
form, repo: https://quickstart.inkeep.com/ai-form). If you want to
try Inkeep on your product's content, just fill out the form in our
landing page. You'll get a demo in your inbox powered by your
public content -- NO "call us", "book a demo", or "schedule a
meeting" required. Note: we do check that your email domain matches
your content to prevent spam. Curious to hear about your
experiences when working with customer/support questions and any
ideas on how else the copilot could be useful for those scenarios.
Author : engomez
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-09-30 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
| ramraj07 wrote:
| How much did you spend on the domain??
| engomez wrote:
| Not too bad - $3k.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I tried this question "How do you track for failures of the
| service?" I had to drill down multiple times but it did give me a
| good understanding of the service. I did notice that it was also
| giving results in javascript. Looks interesting and I have
| problems with my own RAG app https://www.securday.com
| engomez wrote:
| was this in the support copilot or our public-facing bot on our
| landing page? for my fyi what did you mean by 'failures' of the
| service, can look to create some content relating to that.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I first asked for "How to track failures" and it told me some
| code and how to look at analytics. Eventually I figured out
| that I had to explicitly track for hallucinations / up and
| down events etc.. so I was overly broad but was able to drill
| down and understand the system so maybe I was unclear but it
| taught me how your app works.
| engomez wrote:
| Ah understood. I can see how the term is a little fuzzy.
| Glad it highlighted how the product works though.
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| We are customers at windmill.dev and we are really happy with it.
| It also motivates us to write ever better docs as it means more
| answers can be an answered completely by the bot.
| engomez wrote:
| nothing like closing the content loop! try to make that direct.
| kierone wrote:
| windmill.dev looks an awesome solution thanks for the link :)
| Kiro wrote:
| Anyone downvoting this should know that other YC companies
| endorsing a product launch is a certified HN classic, and by
| downvoting it, you're violating a long and rich tradition.
| spking wrote:
| How does this compare to Q for Business?
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/q/business/
| engomez wrote:
| My understanding is that Q is a general purpose internal
| ai/search service - similar to Glean or Microsoft's
| equivalents.
|
| Our tool focuses on support use cases (customer-facing or
| internal-facing), which means we can go deep with workflows
| like detecting gaps in your documentation and focusing our
| efforts on quality around these scenarios. Generally our
| support copilot intro'd here also generates dynamic UIs so goes
| beyond a normal chat interface.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| How are you measuring the confidence of the answers? This is one
| of the biggest challenges I've seen with AI, it provides wrong
| answers to hard questions, which wastes the user's time.
| engomez wrote:
| Take a look at https://docs.inkeep.com/ai-api/openai-chat-
| completion-endpoi...
|
| tl;dr we define a JSON schema with a few semantic labels that
| represent a gradient in confidence. On our end we prompt it
| with certain examples and guidance for when to use each label.
| This is generally a better approach than e.g. asking an LLM to
| give a numeric score.
|
| We also have trained embedding-based classifiers as non-LLM
| heuristics.
| gk1 wrote:
| Highly recommended. Congrats on the HN launch.
|
| Inkeep works great at Pinecone and meaningfully reduced the
| number of support tickets with common questions/issues.
|
| [1] https://support.pinecone.io/
| engomez wrote:
| that's the goal. And now with Keep the goal is to help the
| support team answer those questions that come through faster
| too. Minimizing "time to answer" across the funnel is the goal.
| inerte wrote:
| Unrelated, but has Cursor achieved this kind of mind share?
|
| Last week, I heard about a company (I think it was an YC company)
| describing themselves as "open source Cursor".
|
| Also last week, a comment here on HN stuck with me: "I live
| inside Cursor" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651380
|
| And now, the Cursor for Help Desk.
|
| I've used Cursor, and I loved it. 10 to 1 over regular GitHub
| Copilot, and well worth the $20 dollars and I am a hobby
| programmer (management job during the day).
|
| But... all this? It has become the reference point just like we
| had "Uber for...", "AirBnb for...". It seems like it happened so
| fast.
| asdev wrote:
| it is definitely all the rage in the AI community. what made it
| better than Github Copilot for you?
| inerte wrote:
| Good question, took me a while to figure out why I preferred
| over Copilot.
|
| Number one was the "apply" suggestions from chat, but now I
| think Copilot has it too.
|
| Number two are the suggestions while I am typing to change
| multiple lines at once. Such a time saver.
|
| Number three is how I can send entire files/folders as
| reference in the chat.
|
| Also, it feels a bit snappier? The suggestions seem to come a
| bit faster than Copilot.
|
| In terms of correctness / good good, they're both equally
| good (and bad).
|
| To me it's all about how much time I am saving. When I sit
| down 30-90 minutes 3-4 times a week to code, I just feel like
| it helps me to get more stuff done.
| engomez wrote:
| Have been a Cursor user for ~1yr. I think they just nailed
| the key workflows people wanted - i.e. the fully
| conversational side bar with "apply" buttons and easily being
| able to attach the right files or code snippets you want.
|
| VS Code may have caught up now, but haven't looked back.
| wrs wrote:
| One thing that's better: I'm converting a codebase to a new
| major library version with a lot of breaking changes. The
| suggestions in Cursor are working really well for this. You
| can make an edit to fix a call (or whatever), go to the next
| place and it suggests a similar edit, then just start hitting
| tab as it figures out where else you would want to do the
| same thing. It also seems to have recent edits in context so
| when you go to the next file it's already primed to continue.
| mmarian wrote:
| Seems like it, whenever I ask mid/senior devs for suggestions
| on an AI copilot they all recommend Cursor. Haven't tried it
| though, my bottlenecks involve people and outdated docs ^_^
| tspann wrote:
| Inkeep has been very solid for us and running in our Discord.
| https://milvus.io/community
|
| Robert spoke at our meetup and is awesome.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35JdjmiDvWI
| engomez wrote:
| glad to hear!
| altdataseller wrote:
| How is this different/unique than the thousands of other
| competitors that pretty much promise the same thing? sorry if it
| sounds dismissive of your product, but that's my first
| impression, and probably a lot of other ppl's too, so would be
| good to get a good answer...
| engomez wrote:
| give the playground a shot and let me know what you think.
|
| we answer 250k+ customer-facing questions/mo today for teams
| who really care about quality (Anthropic, Clerk, Pinecone,
| Postman) - we're brining that same care and high bar to our
| copilot for support teams.
|
| the generative UI and conversational aspect is quite different
| than other copilots we've seen.
| gk1 wrote:
| (I'm not from Inkeep but I've seen and used their product.)
|
| I'm not sure how they do it but the answer quality and the UI
| is meaningfully better than all the other "chat with your
| docs"-type products I've tried.
|
| In other words the promised outcome isn't very original but
| they've nailed the execution.
| zkid18 wrote:
| Feel free to correct me on that, but here's my understanding.
| The comprehensive support products cover four main sub-
| products:
|
| 1. FAQ/Knowledge bases with search functionality.
|
| 2. Conversational mediums and agent notifications (e.g., live
| chat widget, messenger support).
|
| 3. Ticket management systems and agent management, which is the
| core of Zendesk/Intercom. This is the most difficult to
| operationalize as it requires process architecture, SLA
| management, etc.
|
| 4. Orchestration and workflow management, which can be done
| inside #3, though some products are available as well.
|
| Most new post-LLM startups target #2 but face platform risks as
| they rely on companies covering #1, #3, and #4 (e.g., Zendesk,
| Intercom, Gorgias).
|
| I feel InKeep doing some combination of #2 but emphasising that
| you can support client whenever they are (ie Github, Discord,
| Slack) instead of asking them to submit tickets in the website
| widget.
|
| Another issue for AI support startup is the
| verticalization/horizontal trap. Most LLMs require solid tuning
| per client, especially for enterprises like us. Startups often
| avoid this initially, opting for a more horizontal general path
| (e.g., AI support for Shopify merchants). This is where
| enterprise players are more beneficial. Thus companies like
| ServiceNow, Zoom, and Oracle offer products for support and
| implementation services.
|
| Neat business imo.
| Godcreator333 wrote:
| are you implying that a custom implementation service for
| enterprises is a good business?
| tschellenbach wrote:
| We use them at getstream.io, the RAG on SDKs is way ahead of
| other platforms in this space.
| bananapub wrote:
| how is this different to all the other identical "we attached
| ChatGPT to a web app" competitors?
|
| how do you ensure that companies don't use this to make it
| impossible to actually contact a human? or do you feel that isn't
| in scope for a product that's encouraging companies to make it
| impossible to contact a human?
| engomez wrote:
| this one is designed for support agents - not to be customer
| facing. Whole goal is to make it more scalable to provide high-
| touch human-based support for teams who are keen on that.
|
| Agree customer-facing AI has to be done in a tasteful and
| mindful way.
| frsandstone wrote:
| There is a typo in the title of your example https://copilot-
| demo.inkeep.com/?ticketId=new-ticket
|
| "Escelating to humans from Inkeep AI Slack bot" : "Escelating"
| --> "escalating"
| engomez wrote:
| ty!
| hajrice wrote:
| We've built something like this at Helpjuice.com - we call it
| Swifty AI Chatbot. It's pretty cool to see companies that are
| building a completely open platform that works with all. Nice
| work folks!
|
| Upvoted - looking forward to supporting you guys more
| gk1 wrote:
| It's not a good look to piggyback off competitors' launches
| like this. Let them have their moment.
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| Entry price of $150/month just to try it - regardless of volume.
|
| Pretty sure most people will go to whoever has a free tier, and
| even that space will be competitive.
| r_thambapillai wrote:
| most folks will go to whomever is free but ultimately most
| folks for whom the problem is valuable will go to whomever is
| best
| gneray wrote:
| Inkeep has been great for us. Congrats on the launch!
| engomez wrote:
| appreciate it!
| latenightcoding wrote:
| Ahh just when founders had finally stopped pitching their
| startups as "the uber for X" now we get "Cursor for X"
| paurora wrote:
| Used Inkeep in my previous company. A+ team & support.
|
| Nick & Rob are very strong leaders.
| engomez wrote:
| appreciate it!
| ThomasRooney wrote:
| We've been a customer for the past year
| (https://speakeasy.com/docs). I was honestly highly skeptical
| about putting a RAG powered search in front of our documentation
| site instead of what we were using (FlexSearch / Nextra). Have
| been delighted to be proved wrong.
|
| The learning I've had is that whilst the majority of queries go
| through standard search patterns (i.e. users search for something
| that's covered by documentation), a subset of queries are not
| answerable by our documentation but only implied by it. I've
| direct experience that Inkeep is serving a large part of that
| user segment and reducing our support burden.
|
| As a very recent/specific example from last week, we had a
| community user generating a terraform provider for an internal
| use-case. By putting error messages from our CLI tooling into
| Inkeep's "Ask AI" feature, they discovered a nuance in
| "x-speakeasy-match" (the error message implied it created a
| circular reference, but didn't spell that out) and self-served a
| solution.
|
| Inkeep effectively turned our documentation into a guided
| tutorial on our product, specific to the customer. Pretty strong
| ROI.
| engomez wrote:
| best way to frame the customer-facing AI: guided tutorials on-
| demand that can translate between user terminology and product
| lingo.
| varunjain99 wrote:
| Do you have any stats / benchmarks of how often it answers a
| question correctly that's present in the customer's
| documentation?
| engomez wrote:
| We measure the opposite now - % of questions where the bot was
| not able to find documentation to answer and it doesn't exist.
| This powers our insights reporting. We generally don't hear
| complaints about false positives here (i.e., cases where there
| were docs), so anecdotally, I'd guess 95%+ else our reporting
| wouldn't be very useful.
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