I worked at Twilio from 2014-2023 and had an incredible experience during those 9 years, including all of my interactions with Jeff.
One of my favorite moments was running into Jeff in the hallway at our Beale Street office just before he had to do a quarterly earnings call after we went public. I said "good luck on the earnings call" and Jeff said thanks then asked what happened to a link to a specific Stack Overflow question/answer from one of our docs pages that got removed. He had just been building an application and felt like that answer was particularly helpful for context in a certain programming language, and was surprised it was removed.
Jeff's always been software developer at heart even though he had a ton of non-dev responsibilities. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages in that mindset! But he created a tremendous company along the way and I wouldn't change working there for anywhere else during those years.
I'd recommend just trying the Colab in my comment above to test out how quick you can do what you want with LeMUR versus building your own. Piping in 100 hours of audio into an LLM can be a lot of work compared to an API call, but it'll depend on what you are building
I used both Google's speech-to-text APIs and Assembly's APIs as well as some other ones to build Twilio Voice phone calling applications. The out of the box accuracy was way better with Assembly and its far easier to quickly customize the language model for higher accuracy in specific domains (for example programming language keywords). Generally I avoid using Google APIs whenever possible since they always seem overly complicated to get started with and have incomplete documentation even when I'm working in Python which should be one of the better supported languages.
Twilio Developer Evangelist here. Our Super SIM Product Manager @matjaxon had his comments held up since he has a new HN account so I'm passing this along from him: "You could send the same information to and from your devices using either SMS Commands or data but it would likely cost you a lot more to use SMS Commands. While our prices start at $0.10 per MB, we bill you in bytes.
For example, if each time your device checks in you exchange 50 KB of data, you could do that 20 times for $0.10. You can only communicate with your device twice using SMS Commands at $0.05 per SMS Command. SMS Commands are often used as a way of configuring some IoT hardware solutions where you can set configuration values over SMS or to communicate with your device if it seems like something is going wrong with its data connection. It's an extra way of interacting with your device that may be deployed into the field thousands of mile away from you."
The traffic bump and feedback was motivating and helpful to know I was on the right track with my content. I also learned there are some comments you just need to ignore and focus on your own vision :)
edit: my traffic was lower than I originally remembered, it was ~5k per month, not 25k in mid-2014
I wanted to keep this blog post as simple as possible so even beginner Python devs could get through it in one short sitting. However, it's definitely possible to integrate the command processing piece with backend APIs. I'd first try using the TextBlob library before an external service though: https://textblob.readthedocs.io/en/dev/
If you're in SF or traveling here sometime soon, you should definitely present this at the SlackDevs meetup where a bunch of us API users get together each month: http://www.meetup.com/SlackDevs/
There's nothing like big blocks of time to get some writing and coding done. Full Stack Python (https://www.fullstackpython.com) got some major updates with new pages, additional sections on current pages and new links to resources. The change log [1] and commit log [2] capture what's new.
Nice work by you and your team so far Leah! Quick question - what's the rationale behind having the two "Page TBD" top links in the nav? Is that to make sure the CSS/design works using placeholders or do you keep them knowing there are groups within the FEC that will definitely need 2 spots on the nav bar?