sarreph (u/sarreph) - Readit News

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

sarreph · 12 hours ago

We’re heading to sleep as we’re on London time! Thanks to everyone who commented & for providing feedback. It’s been immensely useful to hear everyone’s perspectives.

Please reach out to us if you would like to at product@kenobi.ai

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

truekonrads · 14 hours ago

Are you blocked by anti-bot measures for purposes of demo?

sarreph · 13 hours ago

You shouldn't be(!) We have a very high bar set up to be met to be considered bot traffic. Sometimes we are at the behest of the model providers and there's way more latency + even timeouts under higher load.

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

8organicbits · 14 hours ago

How do you ensure that the LLM is creating accurate content? It would be a terrible experience if the LLM rewrote a website with bogus claims that confuse customers.

sarreph · 14 hours ago

We get asked this a fair amount and the way we’re strategising on it is to build more opportunities for the site owners to define context as part of the broad site research that goes into creating the interpolations.

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

block_dagger · 14 hours ago

I tried this on an open source audio streaming website I maintain and the personalized content was completely nonsensical.

sarreph · 14 hours ago

If you would be willing to give us another chance please email product@kenobi.ai with the site you used and we can get the research context that it generated fixed! (This has been a bit of an issue for some users, when the research gathering agent goes down the wrong track)

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

ATechGuy · 15 hours ago

Genuine question: if traffic to websites is down and likely to continue the trend, what would be the value? Do you plan to address agentic browsing in the near future?

sarreph · 14 hours ago

We think that in commercial buying there will still be a place for “discovery”, where B2B visitors gain from being able to independently digest public facing materials themselves. And that this will mean the adoption of agentic browsing is slower than people think.

However, we did already start experimenting with the agentic browsers like Atlas and Strawberry — I built a PoC for the former. But this is still very much experimental!

Edit:

Just wanted to add that your question is a prescient one and it is something we get asked a lot by investors, VCs etc, but hardly ever by people who run businesses with websites, or the people who visit them / do commercial buying.

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

danvayn · 16 hours ago

Do you guys do blogs? I’d love to read some insights about that. AI Efficacy aside, there is a clear advantage here to me that I’m surprised others rebuke. Web 2.0 grew into the behemoth today from the notion of offering bespoke, user-driven content.

sarreph · 15 hours ago

We don’t yet, but if you’d like to email me on rory@kenobi.ai I will let you know when we start.

Appreciate the words!

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

subtlesoftware · 17 hours ago

Small issue: it changed the h1 text value which is the name of the product in our case

sarreph · 17 hours ago

Aah! Thanks for reporting! We’ve seen that in a couple of cases. Feel free to reach out to product@kenobi.ai with the site you’re using and we’ll look into it for you.

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

yungookim · 17 hours ago

How does it work with SEO? for crawlers, it just serves the default site?

sarreph · 17 hours ago

So right now (what we’re demoing), we do “on demand” personalisation, so there isn’t an SEO angle there really. However, we started with pre-rendering changes onto hardcoded URLs and while that did affect content, we didn’t see any SEO issues come up since these URLs were being used in campaigns only.

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

mike-gongolidis · 19 hours ago

I love this idea! This could also be used to transform a site for seniors (legibility/simplicity) or neurodivergent users (summarization/focus modes) and address compliance/UX issues for enterprise brands.

sarreph · 18 hours ago

Thank you. Accessibility came up in another comment and to be honest we've only thought in terms of _preserving_ accessibility so far, not _improving_ it (as you're suggesting) -- would love to see if we could explore something along these lines soon even though right now we're focussed on B2B...

sarreph commented on Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor · Posted by u/sarreph

slugiscool99 · 19 hours ago

Everyone worried about privacy - not sure if they realize everyone is already collecting this type of information anyway?

I think this is cool and probably the future of B2B websites. My holdup would be, if the buyer enters their company and the copy just changes into what we think they want, are they going to lose trust that the copy is a true representation of our focus? Maybe it's a framing problem, lots of websites have "solutions" sections for different industries. Potentially could be cool to have a "how we can specifically help {your company}" with an exact use case outline.

sarreph · 19 hours ago

> if the buyer enters their company and the copy just changes into what we think they want, are they going to lose trust that the copy is a true representation of our focus?

Great point. That's pertinent to how we've been configuring the research → computing "intent" pipelines. Our focus right now is mainly just to streamline content and show brands "in context" as much as possible without having too much of an "opinion".

Your idea about showing how specifically the company could be helped + a use-case is lovely way of putting some of the more complex layout generation ideas we've been working on!