okito

Referrals don't change your position in line. We are letting people in generally first come, first-served.

We use the VIP code because there are some times when you need to let someone in immediately (important partner, people that might be able to help us test a specific feature, etc.)

I think that in general incentivizing people to share by giving them a bump in line feels unfair.

We built it in house. It's pretty tightly integrated with our actual user system.

I think Luka has done a great job of exploring a lot of different approaches to this space. We've bet pretty heavily on the idea that most people will want one bot, not a family of them. But it's exciting to see so many people working to make this happen!

If Google works for you, stick with it! Ozlo is for those questions where using Google would make you do all the work - like finding the best place for a burger in SOMA or automatically remembering restaurants you wanted to try.

You can see some added examples in our blog post: https://medium.com/teamozlo/introducing-ozlo-d5cce73d7ba5

Our suggestions are more like auto-suggest; you can type anything you want. See above!

Hi - we developed our suggestions UI quite some time ago. I think variations are becoming more popular because it's a way of solving the "invisible UI" problem for conversational systems.

Note that with Ozlo, however, our suggestions are just shortcuts. You can also text Ozlo anything you like by tapping on his avatar in the bottom left corner.

Many people who build these are actually just doing menu systems.

Other platforms coming soon! You're invite will still be good. :)

Hi Dave!

Android is on our list, but for not for a few months yet. Eventually Ozlo will be in a lot of different channels - including messengers, the web, and Android.

Ozlo can work over any topic area we let him learn about. We focused on food for the reason you said, but expect to open him up to many new topics soon!

Hey! I'm one of the co-founders of Ozlo. Excited to finally to get to share him with you today. If you want early access, sign up here and we'll let you in:

http://ozlo.com?vip=hackernews

We are not shifting away from the UI - we are just making it less monolithic. Look for more news on this soon.

Hi - I am the creator SproutCore. Thought it might help to provide some context around this.

It's not that you can't make a fast UI with a template-oriented system. The problem HTML makes it very easy for you to do a lot of things - some are very fast, others are very slow. There is no clear line which is which since it has more to do with how you use the DOM than anything else. To make matters worse, the fast paths are different on different browsers.

What this means is that if you want to build really fast UI in the browser using a DOM-centric, template-based system, you are basically taking on all the responsibility to do everything in a fast way yourself. (Which means you also need to know all the little tricks to doing this - many of which are not obvious.) The framework won't be able to really help you.

This is why a JS-based API that takes ownership over the DOM instead of exposing most of it directly to you can be much faster. We can take this crazy world and turn it right side up again with a cogent API that makes it easy to do fast things and harder to do slow things.

hth.