I should clarify something about API.AI...

If you dont want to modify the AI for your own purposes, you can just use ours. There is a cost for this, but it also provides a lot of simplicity in deployment. If you want to modify the AI, this is when you would take our zip file and sign up for your own API.AI developer environment. If you chose to publish your environment for others to use, you would then have to work with API.AI on pricing for your environment.

The more uses we get for any of the services we use, the lower the cost per use becomes. This will help us to continue to improve our AI. By customizing your own, you end up loosing the ability to use any improvements that we develop for ours after the point that you load our zip file into your environment. It would be possible to start over with our AI again after changes have happened, but you would loose your changes.

Anyway, it would be better to request changes be made to the common AI than create your own in my opinion, but that is up to you. The option is available. For a business it might be very logical to take our base and modify it to your business.

The going rate right now is about $87.69 for the server with the power supply, metal case and 2 year warranty. This doesn't include shipping. We flash the hardware so there is not any additional cost of storage and such. You will need a Cat5/6 cable to plug the hardware into your network. There is a webpage that you will use to configure your server.

I estimate the cost per month to be about $30.00. This depends on how quickly things are accepted and how quickly we can get to the price breaks. As we reach those, we will pass along this savings. This ~$30.00 per month will cover the charges passed on to us from API.AI, Wolfram and Nuance for about 33 requests a day or 1000 requests per month. This is really the lowest level of service that we can offer. From there, we would go up by 1000 requests for an additional ~$30.00.

You can have as many clients running against the server as you want, but it is safe to say that the server can handle 5 concurrent requests at a time. This is what we have tested to this point anyway. This means that 5 agents (robot or pc or smart watch or whatever we develop clients for) can be running and submitting requests at the same time. You could be running 100 agents or more but this level of hardware is tested for 5 concurrent connections. As long as you don't exceed this soft threshold you should still be able to get responses back to requests in a couple of seconds.

Larger installations are definitely possible by increasing the cost of the hardware. For about $400 you would have hardware that would support about 20 concurrent requests. This would be more of an office type environment.

Excellent information! Really looking forward to this.

I was a bit low on the cost of the hardware. The server is $87.69 with a metal case, power supply and 2 year warranty. This is the configuration that we would sell these.

Still a good price. And would the customer then own the server? If the customer terminated the service would you them buy back the server? Perhaps a rental on the server could also be an option like modem or cable box rental?!?

It's all yours to do whatever you want to do with at that point. It would contain a database with your information so I don't want to risk anything with it. It stays in your possession.

Got it.

That is some interesting information, seems like the project has a way bigger scale than I imagined...I actually thought of it as a plugin for ARC! Will there also be an option for just getting the hardware and use it without needing a suscription...something like a EZ-AI light for hobbyists?