Inspiration
Critical thinking skills are now more important than ever. To access all of the stored knowledge available to us, it is important that we learn to ask better questions.
Einstein is quoted as saying “If I had an hour to answer a question and my life depended on it, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
The right question can unlock the right answer, sometimes very quickly, but you must first ask the right question.
What it does
The software takes a user's question, sends it to IBM Watson's Developer Cloud and returns a classification of the question, which the provides custom coaching for the user on how to improve there question.
How we built it
Late nights and Red Bull. We explored different machine learning tools, both Ruby gems and tools from other vendors.
Challenges we ran into
Developing a classifier depends on a good training set, so we had to create one rather hastily from scratch. Then we had to tweak the model until we could get consistent and reliable results.
We spent a lot of time learning different APIs and we went down a couple different rabbit holes that lead nowhere.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What we learned
The importance of a good training set. How to use the Watson API and IBM's Bluemix platform.
What's next for Ask Better
Continue to refine the algorithm to add different features and classifiers to improve the coaching. We also want to add a question history so that users can see the ways that their questions improve over time.
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