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I've made some improvements to the oracle, and I'd like to share them with you. If you've been poking around at rukind.ai, you may have hit a wall (and not the wall of sound) and some other blocker, and I've been trying to address them.

Starting with: You no longer need to sign up to ask about a song anymore. "Althea Chords", "Teach me about Uncle Johns Band" all should use a cached version of the data for quick response. if you want to go any deeper, you'll be asked to sign up (its free to use right now). We are using Cloudflare to block bots, as part of that you can now be anonymous. because of this there could be a timing issue between the validation and the question. I default to blocking, so you may see a "give it a breath and ask again" message instead of the previous hard failure.

I've also spent a lot of time trying to figure out the structure of a question, the song, band member, and intent of the question, and building parsers to handle this and direct the response to it. This was one place many questions were lost.

Shakedown street is open for both reverb stores and shakedown vendors. it is currently seeded with about 20 reverb stores, and a few shakedown vendors that gave me stickers. If you are either, if you sign up, you can check to see if you are in it and take ownership, or add yourself to the listings. Reverb is an affiliate link, and shakedown vendors are free of any affiliate relationship.

Things that were broken and now aren't

• There were a few cases where messages would vanish: You would typed something and got nothing back.

• Long questions got bounced with character limits. I doubled this limit, but, if you write a paragraph explaining your situation, the Oracle refused it for being too long. This has been fixed, and I am sorry for those affected by it.

• As you dive into a subject, the oracle may ask some follow up questions. it was intuitive to type "3",and those short answers were bounced.

• Speed. Answers over 20 seconds went from about a third of them to about one in nine. It also streams the response instead of blocking until the answer is ready.

• I have been working on the iOS app, but still waiting on setting up my apple developer account.

What people actually ask it

There are some really cool topics that have a common thread:

• Far and away the most: how to play a specific song. Chords, tab, key, the shape of it.

• Gear questions: mostly around rigs, what pedal made that sound, and how to get near it without spending a fortune.

• Show history: what got played when, how often, which version.

• Song meaning: what a song is about, why it was written

• A smaller group asks the hardest question, which is some version of "I've been playing by ear for years and I've hit a ceiling, what now." A very difficult question to answer, that I spend time trying to fix.

it is very much a beta site, the natural language parsing is quite complex and can be hard to manage. Some other stats: the "brain" is currently comprised of a 435 page wiki with sections on songs, gear, band, techniques and several others all linked together with over 2000 cross references. In addition to over 150,000 forum posts and our gdpedia setlist program, with around 2400 shows. All of this information, stored with rukind, gets referenced each time a question is asked.

And while I haven't worked on them much but there's also the games "bet the set" and the "daily challenge" to waste some time.