Launch HN: Guggy (YC S17) – Make your friends laugh with personalized GIFs
It works like this: Whenever you want to spice up your conversation, you click on the Guggy button and get a selection of GIFs with your text in them. If you find one that you like and that you think is funny, you click it and a link gets copied to your clipboard.
When we started Guggy, we were trying to provide non-technical users with an easy way of creating funny GIFs, and for that we built a GIF editor, only to discover that the real problem was that people had a hard time combining the right text with the right GIF. That got us thinking that we should try to automatically create the text/image pairing, relieving users from the need to search and match. To do that, we've built an NLP engine that understands 'messaging language', that is, slang, excited writing (e.g. “soo amazinggg!”) and leetspeak, to name a few.
We’ve also built a fast image rendering engine that generates the final media for the user in real time. This stands out from existing solutions, which rely on existing media files (served via CDNs). We don’t store the files at all, we generate them on the fly at each request. That gives us flexibility in personalizing the content to the user.
We’re two co-founders who are also cousins. We have been working together on numerous projects for several years, and always wanted to build something related to humor. Of all the projects we've tried, this is the one that just sort of took off, and we've been following where the users want to take us. It's kind of a dream project because the technical challenges are interesting and we get to work in a space that amuses us.
Here is a real example from our users of how a regular message can become expressive and engaging using Guggy - https://img.guggy.com/media/iL1rqhoZE7/animated/2/h/guggy.gi...
We offer our own Android/iOS GIF keyboards for natural experience, or you can just use our standalone apps. We also have bots and an API so you can use Guggy via messengers such as Facebook and Slack.
I've heard that this place can be a bit serious! but if you don't find it annoying, we may reply to bits of your text in the comments with Guggy URLs, just for fun and to show what the system can do.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on our product, and feel free to head to guggy.com and reply with Guggy GIFs :)
75 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadhere: https://guggy.com/
https://img.guggy.com/media/tLJNhkLj2I/animated/2/h/4UEhAtc4...
- When I search for "the universe itself is a giant ocean of distraction.", I see few options and a lot of empty colored boxes which I assumed was empty - but they were loading. So maybe it's better to put a spinner?
- It can be very good if embedded inside FB or Reddit. So a focus there would be better. FB embed (edit- FB shows it on the timeline without a need to click away) worked for me.
- Slight customization of font color, stroke and size could be good - maybe as an advanced setting. But simplicity and defaults are good.
- May I upload my own photo and make my own gug (or whatever).?
- You can post the gif to FB and reddit using the share buttons. What do you mean by embed?
- Advanced customizations and photo upload are on our roadmap, we can't tell yet when we will do it
In several attempts, 4-5 of them were GIFS and the rest waited colored- it was enough for me to assume they were meant to be empty. I have a fast LTE connection. Spinners are a distraction but the slightest, faintest spinner concept can do- and they don't need to spin just maybe just wave or show something is coming.
or maybe don't show the colored boxes at all ..
> We’d love to hear your thoughts on our product
I find it useless and just another dash in the ocean of distraction.
https://img.guggy.com/media/b7E41wFSJh/animated/4/h/1XhEYqMy...
Well said. What makes me a bit sad is that generations of scientists and engineers poured their sweat into building chips, network and a giant incredible infrastructure and what we cheer to is a site with gifs.
I want technology to solve more pressing needs, millions of people commute to work and pollute the environment even tough we have all these internets. And so much else is wasted. Why cannot we have a nicer world - the tech seem to be is here?
For example: I'm your hero #captain america
Even better would be an animation showing the whole work flow, since that is your USP, not the end result per se.
Edit: The tech behind that seems to be interesting, tho. Good job.
As you mentioned, front page results are meant to demonstrate our tech. We are constantly trying to balance the humor side and that, however, making sure every result is funny is not very scalable.
FYI: I tried visiting your about page [1] and get 'Error! We can't find this page'
[1] https://guggy.com/about
Is that not working for you?
Thanks
https://img.guggy.com/media/8gwTJKPnI5/animated/6/h/2WM179sE...
How do you manage to get right image for a text?
Any chance you guys could talk more about how this is implemented? (I'd be interested in the tech stack as well)
Edit: Your about page is 404'ing http://guggy.com/about
The second part is the creatively tagged image repository. Even though tech enables now to tag objects in images, it still can't do it in a creative and funny way, so for the moment we were aiming for quality rather than quantity (I do agree that massive existing GIF repositories do not yield desired results), whereas we have plans for extending our repository significantly in the future.
The third part is also what we consider a big advantage of Guggy, and that's the image rendering engine. That allows us to personalized each request, such that different users could potentially see different results for the same texts (imagine seeing them in a font that you like, and your friend sees them in a different font, but there are also other applications for this). The images are therefore rendered on the fly per each request and are never stored.
Hope that clears up the questions you had in mind.
Something that you guys might find interesting. Even after a day I already forgot exactly the name of Guggy, instead attempting to navigate to http://guppy.com and http://gubby.com. Probably just my bad memory, but might help you guys out if you see bad retention.
We will think how to make our brand more memorable, thanks.
Have you considered some sort of lightweight machine vision for pinning text to the scene, similar to many of the gifs in Reddit's /r/highqualitygifs / Instagram's stories?
We generally store necessary data for generating the GIFs within the URLs themselves. Then we use stateless servers to generate the files. These read the data and overlay the text on top of the GIF.
> Have you considered some sort of lightweight machine vision for pinning text to the scene, similar to many of the gifs in Reddit's /r/highqualitygifs / Instagram's stories?
Yes, it's in the roadmap. We used to have text effects such as the ones appearing here:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/400/1*Ws-pXgOsNkLwhVbyl9...
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*YiT8QgLZ1JAr7DmjX-...
But we came to the conclusion it's too distracting. The thing is that Guggys are essentially an enriched text message, maybe even more than they are GIFs, so we want to make sure that while keeping it visually appealing, we also allow our users to send their message in a clear way, a trait we feel is absent from current GIF products.
I have some feedback to share:
- A thing that bothers me a bit is the extremely long URL that Guggy generates. It's probably not a priority, but those would look and play nicer as shortened links.
- As always there's a slight "uncanny valley" problem when computers match up images with natural language. I sent this to a co-worker as a test, and she complained about the insincere looks on the Seinfeld cast faces: http://bit.ly/2viBamB. It achieved the opposite of what I intended :I
- Let people re-caption existing Guggies
> A thing that bothers me a bit is the extremely long URL...
Most platforms on which Guggys get shared either do not show the URL or shorten it. Could you say where did it bother you?
> As always there's a slight "uncanny valley" problem...
Interesting point. The thing is that if we have only the scope of the short message, such as "it's great", it's hard to predict whether you're being slightly cynical or sincere, so we try to provide with a few options to choose from.
> Let people re-caption existing Guggies
I see. It's more relevant to the website but I can think of a few ways we can do it on our apps too. We'll give it a thought.
Thanks!