Does anyone know a better alternative to Google Translate API? - api

I already did similar search terms for this topic in this forum.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6151668/alternative-to-google-translate-api
But that post is a bit old.. Things may have changed for about a year. And I wonder does anybody know if there's any better REST-based API service that I can use out there since that post was last posted.
Thanks.

I guess Bing translator could be the substitute that u are looking for.

I was looking for alternatives as well and came across a npm package called google-translate-api-browser which does work for my small project, but I can't assure big data translations or requests not being throttled

Related

Can Dialogflow agents be created, updated and deleted (managed) 100% programmatically?

I am looking to wrap a bot service in order to enable business areas to create and manage them at will with minimal technical knowledge, but meeting our strict security controls. With this in mind I need to be able to create and manage them 100% programatically.
I have been working on a prototype with Microsoft's Bot Framework, Luis and QnA Maker. Sadly though joining these technologies requires a number of manual steps, specifically:
Creating a bot in Azure (Bot Framework)
Creating a Luis Account
Joining Luis bot with Azure(the subscription management part
of the API was recently deprecated)
Creating a QnA Account
Microsoft really don't feel very joined up at all...
With this in mind I am now looking for alternatives and thus looking to see what Google are up to. I am just a bit weary of heading off in a new direction to find similar issues.
Looking briefly at the API documentation it seems I should be able to import an agent in to a project and then manage it. I imagine I could use a template to create my bots from.
Thanks for your time
Mike
Thanks for your feedback.
The way I see it, Bot Framework is more modular than other options out there. First of all, creating a LUIS and QnA account are optional and not time consuming. The average use case can be solved with less than 50 lines of code with no need to throw LUIS or QnAMaker into the mix. Why should Microsoft force you to use LUIS if you might not need it? Google uses a different approach. In my opinion, they give you most of the tools from start, like the NLP agent, so you need to understand NLP concepts even if you don't really need to use them. Most developers tend to overthink their bots and make them more complex that hey need to be.
With that said. We don't provide a way to create agents programmatically. But the process of registering your bot is very straight forward and fast. Let me know if you have any problems on this regard.
Please, take a look at our samples here:
https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-Samples
They can give you a very deep knowledge on what architecture to use for different scenarios. Many times there is a simpler way to achieve the same goal and Microsoft does not try to force you to use the most advanced techniques. Most of the time you can achieve your goal with very simple and easy to maintain code.
Francisco
A Quick Update, in the end we went with a solution based on this idea:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/creating-a-question-and-answer-bot-with-amazon-lex-and-amazon-alexa/
I can simply create a new bot by executing cloudformation.

Advanced Ajax with RoR and jQuery UI

I don't have much web development practical experience although I had studied a lot on the web (Treehouse, CodeSchool, other tutorials and articles).
I have found some explanations on how to use Ajax with RoR and jQuery. But I'm having difficulties to understand how to solve my problem as the explanations often use jquery-ujs that I suppose I can't use in my case.
My problem is difficult to explain here but is similar to implementing this shopping cart on RoR, including more parameters like price
The jQuery UI is working for me in my RoR application. What is missing is the AJAX part and how to make it work with RoR
I have found some questions here on StackOverflow that is about this topic but it didn't helped much as they are probably for more advanced users.
So, I believe that the best help would be a tutorial or book or some other reference that is more similar to my problem. However any advice or other kind of directions may help
After struggling a lot, finally I solved my problem.
I will post here the resources and some tricks that helped me. I hope it can help others. StackOverflow didn't let me post all the links. For this reason, I just gave some hints that may help to find some resources.
About the jQuery Ajax concepts, I recommend Code School jquery course "The Return Flight".
The second thing that I think helps is learn to debug. Firebug helped me a log to debug the client side/javascript/Ajax. This link may help on that:
http://www.zyxware.com/articles/2642/debugging-tips-how-to-debug-ajax-requests-using-mozilla-firefox-and-firebug
Since the problem may be to debug RoR. Look for a RailCast on the subject.
One of the things that I took some time is if it would be better to use $.ajax(), $.post(), $.get() or $.getJSON(). The link below may explain better but to sum it up, $.ajax() is the more generic one and the other are simpler ones and that call $.ajax() with specific parameters.
Difference between $.post and $.ajax?
It is important to understand how RoR routing works to call the right url with the right $.ajax() type. "rake routes" may help.
This link may also help to use the right $.ajax() type.
http://old.thoughtsincomputation.com/posts/understanding-rest-in-rails-3
Finally, to send the right format from the javascript to RoR controller, this link may help:
How to send and store data to rails through jquery/ajax as a JSON object?

In what forms do APIs come in, and how to write them?

APIs are getting more and more popular and are used by developers to ease the process of developing applications to multiple platforms AND allow them to give other developers the ability to integrate their application's functionality into their own applications.
I've used APIs countless times before, but I'm now at the stage of developing my own applications. And as a developer who strives to create multi-platform applications - I need to use an API.
I'm going to use the RESTful approach as it's recommended the most.
After reading and looking for some background information, I came across: REST API Tutorial (which is really good site!), I learned that APIs basically receive HTTP requests, and return data in JSON/XML format.
However, there were 2 questions left unanswered to me:
In what form do APIs come in? Are APIs actually files? a set of commands......?
How do I actually write APIs? I'm talking about the server-side, data-handling code, and not the application/language-specific code (for sending out HTTP requests etc...)
It'd be great if someone could help me and answer the questions above as I have zero experience with APIs.
Any help is appreciated - much thanks!!
Just a quick from-the-gut answer: They are whatever you want them to be!
Off the top of my head, I would define an API as requiring two main elements:
Some documentation which makes it quite clear how to use the logic your systems prvides
Some way to call those systems. That may be as simple as a web-site that accepts POST-messages, and checks them for certain variables and values in order to perform specific tasks.
In short, it should be entirely up to you. Just make sure you provide simple, clear and acurate documentation.
UPDATE, as an asnwer to the comment below:
That is how I interpret it, and it would seem that Wikipedia is more or less in agreement with me. PHP would be a perfect example: You could for instance create a PHP-file which processes a POST, and instead of outputting html, outputs XML with the resulting data needed. Then a third party app could POST to your PHP application, and receive and process the resulting XML.
Apis come as a response to a http request. It is a plain text response that u can use encoded via json or xml as you described.
There are a plenty of frameworks to help you develop and API.
In Ruby u can use grape or rais-api or even rails itself.
There is a lot more available, but this are the ones im most used to use.

Tracking techniques used by internet advertisers

I know it looks like I haven't done my research but... I don't seem to be able to find any reliable papers/websites explaining in detail the tracking techniques used by the internet advertisers. (and believe me, I've been looking for good sources for 5 months now). Has anyone done any similar research / project in the past? Can you suggest any reading?
Just in case if my post is not clear, this was one of many questions i had:
How Do Internet Advertisers Use Third-Party Cookies?
Here are a few research studies:
Persistent Cookies
Folly of Detecting Tracking from Cookies

What tools exist to find frequencies of searches

I'm new to seo, so please excuse what may be a very basic question.
I want to count (or estimate) the number of times that a given search phrase has been searched within a particular time period. Are there any API's out there for this? Does Google (or any other relevant search engine) release this information?
Any helpful links are greatly appreciated.
I'll be using Java, though I doubt that makes much difference.
I'm not aware of any API for it, but you can use Google Insights for Search
I use link text
it also presents the volume for every search
It looks like the WordTracker API might be the best took for programmatically finding search data.
http://www.wordtracker.com/api/
Check out this improv API to Google Trends which helps you export data.